This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

104 Powers Street. (Photo: Zuha Siddiqui)

There’s a building at 104 Powers Street in Williamsburg, an inconspicuous row house just around the corner from the rooftop bars, art galleries and coffee shops near the Lorimer L stop on Metropolitan Avenue. White clapboard slats, sloping roof. Look closer, and there’s a discreet, white turret topped with a crescent. If no one had pointed it out, you wouldn’t know you were walking past North America’s oldest surviving mosque.

Alyssa Ratkewitch is the mosque’s current caretaker. Her grandfather, Alexander, was its Imam during the 1960s. On a warm Saturday afternoon in early October, she drove the hour to Brooklyn from her home in Long Island to give me a tour of the building. It’s been opening only sporadically since the mid-1960s when Lithuanian Tatars began moving out of Brooklyn towards Long Island and beyond. “Some are in Massachusetts, Connecticut, even California,” Ratkewitch told me. But they still drive down to the mosque for major events, she said, such as Kurban Bayrami — the Lithuanian term for Eid — or iftar dinners, or for weddings and funerals.

Once inside the building, Ratkewitch explained that the interior of the mosque has not changed much since the American Mohammedan Society of Lithuanian Tatars first purchased the building in 1931. The inexpensive wood wall paneling has a faux oak finish— to give the illusion of grandeur, Ratkewitch says. Since the building has no central heat, three space heaters kept in the basement are brought upstairs to provide warmth when the building is in use. Framed paintings and framed calligraphy in Arabic and Cyrillic line the walls of the basement and the first floor, where worship is held.  To remind them of home, Tatars who emigrated from Lithuania to New York in the early 20th replicated familiar paintings they left behind. “They were a small community in the home country,” Ratkewitch said. “And they created a similar, small community here, in Brooklyn.”

Interior of the mosque’s first floor, where prayers are held. The walls are lined with paintings that the Tatars drew after they migrated to the United States. (Photo: Zuha Siddiqui)

The American Mohammedan Society’s purchase of the property was the fifth since it was marshland owned by William Powers, a landowner for whom the street is named. Powers owned several plots of land in what was then called the Village of Williamsburgh; neighboring settlers included Schenck, DeBevoise, Thursby, Boerum, Vandervoort, Polhemus-Wycoff, Harrison, Conklin, and Bogaert farms. By the mid-nineteenth century, Powers had sold the property to Isaac Henderson, the business manager and later, publisher of The Evening Post.

Henderson owned 104 Powers Street, along with several other properties, but didn’t develop any of them. Neither did John Stossel — a Prussian florist from Hesse-Darmstadt who purchased the land from Henderson between 1864 and 1866. Instead, he converted the property as a greenhouse for his flowers. Foundations for a building were first laid on 104 Powers Street in 1885, when it became the Powers Street Methodist Episcopal Church. The interior still resembles a church today, with three short steps leading up to an altar on the first floor that the Lithuanian Tatars converted into a mimbar  — the Muslim equivalent of a pulpit. Congregants stand diagonally to pray and a makeshift partition separates the women’s prayer area from the men’s section; unlike conventional mosques that face the ka’aba in Mecca, 104 Powers Street is not a purpose-built mosque and led past lives as a District Assembly Clubhouse, a Gospel Church, Episcopal Church and a greenhouse.

Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. “Sheet 7: Map encompassing Williamsburg, E. Williamsburg and Bushwick” (The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1869.)

On September 30, 1843, a 26-year-old florist from Prussia named John Stossel arrived in New York aboard the Florida. In Prussia, Stossel had been the head gardener for the King. It took him a few years to settle down in the United States, and on May 1, 1852, Stossel married Elizabeth (Lizzie). Soon after, on June 28, 1861, Stossel and his wife became US citizens and amassed a personal estate value of $1,000 — the equivalent of $30,468 today. Between 1864 and 1866, Stossel purchased 104 Powers Street from the Hendersons along with several other properties, for the purpose of building his greenhouses.

The Newtown Register (New York, New York) · June 23, 1881.

In the mid-1870s, Stossel began to garner publicity in the local press, but not for the best reasons. On August 18, 1875, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that he, “with a long dagger of antique make, threatened the lives of his wife and other members of his household.” The dagger was a highly prized family relic that belonged to a friend of Stoessel’s, whose family had received it from a German king 600 years earlier. In the weeks that followed, Stossel was committed at the Flatbush Asylum for the Insane, where he remained for the next six months. Towards the beginning of 1876, he had a six-week-long stint at the Asylum for the Insane at Flushing.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · April 12, 1876.

Soon after his release from the Flushing asylum, a catastrophic incident rattled Stossel’s life. On the 12th of April, 1876 he and his wife were gathering hay on their Williamsburg farm. As they began driving their carriage toward the barn, a heavy jolt caused Elizabeth to slide off her seat. The Eagle reported that Stossel attempted to break her fall, but failed, and both of them tumbled out of the carriage. He emerged unscathed, but Elizabeth sustained a fractured leg and multiple internal injuries. She died a week later. After her death, Stossel’s mental health nosedived once again — this time, reported the Brooklyn Union, permanently. He began to sit on cakes of ice to keep cool, amused himself by shooting off soda water bottles to let the spirit out, imagined that he was beset by witches, and that the devil was coming after him through the windows and doors of his house. The Prussian King’s Gardner became the neighborhood lunatic.

n April 1885—a year before Stossel’s death—two Williamsburg developers, Louis Gfroehrer and Edward McCarty, bought 104 Powers Street and sold it immediately to the Second Methodist Episcopal Church, in exchange for the property the church owned nearby at the corner of Grand Street and Ewen Street, which is now Manhattan Avenue. However, the nearby Leonard Street Methodist Church protested that the new location would be too close to its own location.

A report in the Eagle on May 20, 1885 described the concerns of the Leonard Street congregation as “an invasion of their territory; and it is intimated that they are about to appeal to the Conference for protection.” Nonetheless, the new church was built and became known as the Powers Street Methodist Episcopal Church.

Drama seemed to follow the 104 Powers Street property. In 1887, the church found itself in the middle of a scuffle between its pastor, the Rev. George Mooney and his congregants. On April 18, 1887, the Eagle described this as “a great deal of unpleasantness” that resulted in the formation of two factions among the church’s congregants: one supported George Harmer, a prominent member of the congregation, and the other stood with Mooney. Driven away from the church by a “hostile majority,” Mooney started his own independent congregation on Van Cott Avenue in Greenpoint.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · April 18, 1887.

When the church wasn’t caught up in drama, it was the site of a number of child marriages. In April 1892, in a story the Eagle described as a “pretty romance,” Harry C. Lovejoy, the 18-year-old son of wealthy Lorenzo W. Lovejoy, married 14-year-old Lottie C. Walsh—“one of the prettiest girls in Grammar School No. 8, Brooklyn.” The wedding took place at the Powers Street church, much to the chagrin of his father. Harry and Lottie lied to the pastor, Rev. Nathan Hubbell; Harry claimed he was 20, and Lottie said she was 17. Once Harry’s father found out that his teenage son had married, and stolen his best broadcloth suit, he had him arrested. It took a week for Lovejoy Sr.’s anger to cool and he forgave his son, enabling this release from jail. The couple remained married.

By 1896, the fate of the church on 104 Powers Street was sealed. The concerns of the Leonard Street church proved warranted—the membership of both congregations dropped. By April, the Powers Street church and the Leonard Street church united under the umbrella organization of the Brooklyn Church Society, and new church on the Leonard Street property—large enough to accommodate both congregations, opened. The cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new building took place on July 19, 1900. Six months later, the new Union Methodist Episcopal Church opened for the consolidated congregations. Charles H Colby, a manufacturer, and his son bought the Powers Street property from the the Brooklyn Church Society in March 1901. They ran an interdenominational Gospel Mission Church there, with Rev. Edward Holden as the pastor. Charles’ daughter, Lily, directed an industrial school at the church.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · Oct 30, 1913.

In 1913, the Colbys sold the property to the 13th Assembly District Realty Company, and it became the district’s Democratic Club headquarters and clubhouse. From 1913 up til 1931, 104 Powers Street transformed from a quiet place of worship to a noisy clubhouse that hosted meetings, debates, musical programs, charity balls and receptions that lasted till late hours of the night.

Neighbors, of course, weren’t pleased. “Residents of Powers street, between Manhattan avenue and Leonard street, have complained to the police that their slumbers and Sundays are being made miserable by the noise that comes from the clubhouse of the Thirteenth Assembly District Democratic Club,” said a report published in Eagle on July 28, 1915. The report went on to describe the activities in the clubhouse as “rackets.” “Brass bands blare forth at all hours of the night,” it said.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · Jul 28, 1915.

Quiet returned to the neighborhood when 104 Powers Street became, once again, a place of worship. This time, however, it wasn’t a church. In 1931, the American Mohammedan Society, Inc. — an organization of Tatar Muslims from Lithuania, parts of Poland and Belarus — bought the property from the 13th Assembly District Realty Company, for the purposes of converting the property into a mosque. They filed alteration and plumbing and drainage permits between May and August of that year. 

Lithuanian or Lipka Tatars — the word ‘Lipka’ being the Crimean word for Lithuania — are sunni Muslims and descendants of 14th and 15th-century Turkic settlers in the Baltic region. They assimilated into Eastern Europe — as political immigrants from Ottoman and Turkic Khanates, and as warriors, hired by Vytautas, the grand duke of Lithuania — and lived peacefully in the region, enjoying all the rights and freedoms that their fellow Christian citizens did. “In the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — between the 16th and 17th century — there may have been up to two dozen mosques,” wrote Egdunas Racius in his article for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. “By the beginning of the twentieth century only half a dozen remained. During the Soviet era they all were closed, but several have been repaired and reopened since the beginning of the 1990s.”

In the late 19th and early 20th century, waves of Lithuanian Tatars migrated to New York and settled in Williamsburg, formally organizing themselves as the American Mohammedan Society in 1907. When the American Mohammedan Society bought 104 Powers Street in 1931 — along with adjacent plots 106 and 108 — they became the first corporate body to purchase land in New York City with the express purpose of practicing Islam. An article in a 1935 issue of The Muslim World Journal describes 104 Powers Street as a three-story wooden building that is the “only real mosque which exists today in America.”

“It was an inexpensive, sketchy neighborhood back in the day,” Ratkewitch told me. We laughed, because gentrification has made this area of Williamsburg the opposite of “inexpensive” and “sketchy.”

Interior of mosque’s first floor. This picture shows the mimbar, which congregants face when they pray. (Photo: Zuha Siddiqui)

“People settled here, sent money home, and then got their families in the Home Country to come here,” she said. “Eventually, a small, steady flow of immigrants from the home country began coming here, knowing that they had a touchstone here in America, knowing that they had people here who spoke their languages, ate their food, knew their traditions and holidays. By 1931, they had managed to save enough money to buy 104 Powers Street, and the property next door.”

Samuel A. Rafalowitz acted as Imam of the mosque in 1934. He was among the waves of migrants from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, arriving in the United States in 1908 from Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1930, Rafalowitz began renting a house on Leonard Street in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from the Powers Street mosque. And by 1935, Rafalowitz was the Imam of the mosque, and he, along with his wife, five children, son-in-law and grandson were living in the annex adjacent to 104 Powers Street.

Founding members of the Powers Street mosque. Rafalowitz is in the center wearing the white cap.

In the mosque’s office, Ratkewitch has carefully kept records of the American Mohammedan Society’s constitution, first drafted in 1907. She also has ledgers from the 1930s onwards; written in neat Cyrillic alphabet, the ledgers contain records of Lithuanian Tatar families who paid their dues to the mosque when it was first established. A framed registration certificate — dated 1927 — hangs on one of the wood panelled walls of the mosque. Scrawled on the certificate is the signature of Robert Moses.

Certificate of incorporation dated 1927. (Photo: Zuha Siddiqui)

Earlier this year, Ratkewitch and other members of her community went to the home country: Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. The early Tatar migrants’ communication with the Baltic ceased after the Iron Curtain was drawn across Europe, and Lithuania became a Soviet republic. “For the first time, my parents’ generation went and visited the towns that our ancestors came from, places that existed in stories that were passed down from generation to generation,” she said. “I’m still wrapping my head around it — it was such a surreal experience.”

She then gestured towards a bunch of framed photographs on the wall — most of them are black-and-white, dating back to the 1940s and yellowing with age, a few are more recent. They’re of community picnics, brunches, get-togethers; grinning parents and grandparents standing behind a row of children sitting cross legged on the grass. “I was looking at these pictures one day and I found my grandmothers — dad’s mom and mum’s mom — sitting next to each other, before they were in-laws. This was a pretty close-knit community,” Ratkewitch said. Peering closely, she also located her aunt and uncle in one of the pictures.

In September 1959, the Greenpoint Weekly Star discovered the Powers Street mosque and ran a story about it on its front page. It described a thriving community that was centered around the mosque — a place where young people came regularly to study the Koran and participated in youth organizations and social programs. “In the very heart of Williamsburg,” the story went on to say, “the exercise of one of the world’s major faiths is carried out by proud Tatar-Americans with Slavic names and an abiding conviction — that, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger.’”

The Lithuanian Tatar community in Brooklyn has shrunk dramatically since then. These days, the mosque usually only opens up for weddings and funerals, presided over by a part-time Imam of Bulgarian descent who lives in Long Island. But Ratekwich hopes that this will change soon. “My son’s azaan took place here, we had a kurban bayram barbeque and an iftar dinner during the summer and we invited over our mosque’s lovely neighbors,” she said. “This is a beautiful, enormous space in Williamsburg and we’d like to spruce it up and open it up more — for social programs, cooking classes, interfaith lectures — and show people that Muslim Americans have been living in this country for over a century.”

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

Allen Ross lives in a castle, but it feels more like purgatory.

Ross is diabetic, arthritic and schizophrenic and had to turn to the Bedford Atlantic Armory Men’s Assessment Shelter when he could no longer pay his rent. He’s spending his day passing time in the shadows of the turrets that tower four stories into the air above Crown Heights. Like the rest of the residents of the 124-year-old edifice that has been a shelter since 1983, Ross is in the assessment phase of the New York City shelter system, meaning he is waiting to be placed in long-term housing. The typical stay at Bed-Atlantic lasts 21 days.

Ross spends his wait sitting on the steps of a boarded-up apartment block across the street, avoiding the armory which he says makes him sick. But each night, he passes back through the armory’s stone archway and under the wrought-iron portcullis with the old coat-of-arms of the defunct 23rd regiment of the New York National Guard. “Vigilantia” reads the regiment’s crest. The word is Latin for alertness, but can also mean wakefulness or a condition of not sleeping.

For Ross, the latter definition is more apt, for a bed provides relief from the weather but little rest. He complains about the food, the ministers who come to proselytize, and the fights that break out between residents on medication for a host of ailments. “They put people in there to get better,” he said, but “they get sick.”

He is just one occupant of a New York City shelter system serving the most people since the Great Depression. Together, at nearly 64,000 strong, they would overflow Yankee Stadium. For Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to remake New York City into the “fairest big city in America,” the homeless represent a canary in the coalmine of inequality. Since the mid-’90s, as rent soared in the city while wages remained mostly stagnant, the number of people without a home doubled.  Bed-Atlantic, which houses up to 400 men a night, is essential to “turning the tide,” as the mayor puts it.

Though this castle appears a curio in Crown Heights today, throughout the history of Brooklyn it’s been a failsafe of final resort. For it was constructed in another epoch of stark inequality — the Gilded Age, when labor unions and strikers threatened the newfound wealth of industrialists at the turn of the 19th century. The brownstone walls, Romanesque Revival architecture, and even the earth beneath it have always protected the city’s civic order — or its status quo, depending on how you look at it. This fortress that occupies almost an entire city block has served many purposes over the years: homestead for Brooklyn’s early gentry, symbol of law and order, event space for the city’s well-to-do, and now a refuge for those with nowhere else to go.

Today, the castle is guarded by parked NYPD cruisers, a few watchful officers of the peace, and a metal detector, but when Brooklyn celebrated the start of construction of the armory in 1891, crowds gathered for its inauguration. The 23rd Regiment of the National Guard, nicknamed “Ours” because it attracted the best of Brooklyn, marched through the streets of the city to a grandstand erected for Governor David B. Hill. The state architect Isaac G. Perry wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle how he, along with architects Halstead P. Fowler and William Hough, had designed the armory’s castle-like features to “present a massive and imposing elevation” and provide “safe protection to sentinels when on duty in guarding the armory.”

But the imposing towers and turrets of the armory have not protected it from gaining a bad reputation. This year, The New York Daily News called the shelter one of the most “dangerous” in the city after an investigation showed police made 89 arrests at the facility in 2017 and responded to 865 requests for assistance. In February, 21-year-old Miguel Acosta bled to death after being stabbed in a dispute just outside the door. And the same month, the New York Post reported that a broken trash compactor unleashed a rat and cockroach infestation.

The Department of Homeless Services is trying to change the armory’s reputation by “opening the doors,” as Isaac McGinn, the department’s press secretary, put it on a recent tour.

“We’re not only responsible for helping New Yorkers experiencing homelessness get back on their feet — providing the staffing, services, programs, and supports that this round-the-clock mission requires — but for being conscientious stewards of a historic, landmarked building, ensuring it is well-maintained and thoughtfully utilized,” McGinn said.

On a recent Thursday morning, the inside of the shelter smelled more like bleach than bedlam. The shelter staff smiled as they filled out paperwork, and crews of custodians mopped the floors and changed sheets.

The Department has changed the armory from its “three hots and a cot” days when hundreds of men would sleep in the open-air drill hall of the armory. Today, eight to 12 beds occupy the rooms that used to be lounges filled with portraits of past commanders, plush furniture, and trophies won by the 23rd Regiment. One room even featured a large, stuffed eagle that a member of the regiment killed with a club while on a tour of Michigan.

Shelter residents gather in a recreation room with table tennis and pool tables, although most sit in chairs with hoods pulled over their faces, apparently trying to get some sleep. And in the drill hall, where the 23rd Regiment used to practice their marksmanship at a firing range and host sporting events like tennis and track, the Department of Homeless Services Police trains its recruits in skills like crisis management, understanding mental health disorders, and tactical training.

The Department of Homeless Services opened the training center at the armory earlier this year. It may not have been intentional, but the new training center returns the drill hall to its original use: preparation for a crisis.

When the armory was built during the Gilded Age, the United States was growing into an industrial power at the same time large amounts of immigrants began arriving in the city. Tenements, riots, and strikes began to dominate headlines and concern the gentry.

“THE MOB RULES … Incendiary Utterances by the Communists of New York … A Reign of Terror Throughout the Land … Law-Abiding Citizens Looking The Situation Square In The Face … They Realize that Mob Violence Must be Suppressed at all Hazards and Whatever Cost,” declared the headlines of the Detroit Free Press in a Tuesday night dispatch from July 25, 1877.

The national guard became the response of choice, and armories like the one the state built for the 23rd Regiment provided a base for those units to train and deploy. The state formed the regiment during the Civil War to look after the families of the soldiers at the front as well as to protect the city, according to the New York Tribune. The soldiers of the 23rd deployed to Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, but were ordered back to New York after the Draft Riots ravaged the city that July. Irish immigrants, set off by President Lincoln’s draft orders, began looting and killing black people in Manhattan, whom they blamed for the war. Historians call it the nation’s bloodiest race riot.

This was only the beginning. Over the years, the 23rd became adept at threatening and intimidating rioters and strikers into submission. In 1902, Jasper Ewing Brady, the national guard correspondent for Brooklyn Life wrote, “Just get up a riot in this city and every one will feel very much safe if the Twenty-third is out. This has been proven time and time again.”

In the decades following the war, labor strikes and violence continued across the northeast. “Scenes of riot and bloodshed accompanied it such as we have never before witnessed in the uprising of labor against capital,” wrote Harper’s Weekly of the railroad strikes in Baltimore on Aug. 11, 1877.

That year, as railroad workers organized and protested their working conditions, the 23rd deployed to the railroad strike in Hornellsville, New York. The telegrammed orders were clear: “You are wanted here as soon as you can come.” The regiment also protected the status quo in Brooklyn, assisting the sheriff in incidents like the 1870 hanging of an Irishman named William Chambers who was convicted of murdering one of Brooklyn’s well-to-do. Fearing a mob set on freeing the prisoner, the Kings County sheriff called upon the National Guard with the words, “Apprehending tumult and riot, you are directed to order for service this evening at 7 o’clock…” The regiment deployed to make sure Chambers hanged without incident.

During these years, New York went on a spree of armory building. By 1900, the city, county and state pooled resources to build 50 of these fortresses. The state constructed one on Clermont Avenue a few blocks west of Fort Greene Park for the 23rd in 1972, but just 18 years later the regiment leaders began petitioning Albany for the funds for a new headquarters and training hall. As the city’s crack riot-busters, they got their wish.

On May 7, 1889, the state assembly passed a bill that gave the 23rd $300,000, which is equivalent to $7.9 million today, for the purchase of land and construction of the new fortress. Col. John N. Partridge, a civil war veteran and commanding officer of the regiment, soon settled on the southwest corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues. It’s not clear why he preferred this site, but the strategic advantage is obvious. An 1885 map of the Long Island Railroad shows the Bedford station just across the street. From this position, the national guard could quickly deploy to protect the railroad or travel to other parts of the city or state.

A rumor even passed around the regiment’s ranks that its rival, the 13th Regiment, was eyeing the land for its new armory. Regiment history holds that Partridge secured the land with a downpayment from his personal funds just a day before the 13th Regiment made its bid. In the months leading up to the state’s purchase, real estate records reveal a scramble for the land.

Silas Condict, a real estate developer and banker from Pittsburgh, purchased part of the plot from the Mutual Life Assurance Society just before the legislature in Albany passed the bill. Russell O. Frost, a builder, acquired the other plots on the proposed building site only two weeks after Condict. While the two speculators tried to drive up the asking price for the land, a commission of local real estate agents settled the final amount. The men received modest profits. On January 16, 1890, the state paid Condict $81,000 for his plots and Frost $25,000 for his.

The next year, the regiment celebrated the laying of the cornerstone by Governor David B. Hill. But as the design and construction commenced, controversy followed. The state architect Isaac G. Perry took credit for the design and wrote effusively of the turrets, portcullis, and ventilation ducts that would carry away the smoke from the gun range. But Halstead P. Fowler and William Hough, the architects hired by Perry to design the armory, felt they deserved more credit. In the New York Times’s “National Guard Notes” column from October 8, 1893, the architects complained that they were listed as associate architects to Perry. While they had not designed an armory before and wouldn’t again, Fowler was a captain in the regiment, which likely helped the firm win the contract. Perry, on the other hand, designed several Romanesque Revival armories throughout the state and is responsible for many of the buildings of that style.

On November 4, 1894, the regiment marched through the streets from their old armory on Clermont Avenue, past the residence of Brooklyn’s mayor, Charles Schieren, and into their new headquarters. The “society people of the Heights and Hill” then came out to the opening fair to inspect the new building, witness the marksmanship of the guardsmen at their firing range, and make sure they were seen by Brooklyn Life, which documented the women’s choices of gowns. “The event was stamped with the hall mark of success, social and financial, on that night,” the weekly noted.

This was not the first time the gentry claimed the land, though. For dating back to the colonial era, the Lefferts family had worked this ground to rise to become one of Brooklyn’s first leading families. A family Dortrecht Bible records that Laffert Pieterse van Haughwout (meaning Laffert, son of Peter from Haughwout) immigrated to the country from northern Holland in 1660. He moved to one of the early Dutch settlements to Flatbush, then considered part of Long Island. Laffert Pieterse and his wife Femmetje Hermanse had 14 children and bought up large tracts of land in southern Brooklyn, including a plot in the hamlet of Bedford, which was centered where Fulton Street meets Bedford Avenue today. One of his sons, Jacobus, moved north to Bedford and established his homestead there. On April 4, 1753, he bought a plot of land for £760, which is about $170,000 today, from a blacksmith named Hendrick Fine who happened to also be his son-in-law.

The plot lay on the south side of the Brooklyn and Jamaica turnpikes (Atlantic Ave. today) and west of the old clove road (Bedford Ave. today) that led up from Flatbush. The family built a mansion on this plot, and behind it cultivated fields where the armory now stands.

An early map from Bernard Ratzer’s survey of Long Island in 1766 and 1767 indicates a slave burial ground across the road from the Lefferts’s farm. Indeed, Jacobus Lefferts, like many of the settlers, reported having one male and two female slaves on the 1755 census.

The family accumulated land and wealth in the area and Jacobus’s sons and grandsons became prominent figures in Brooklyn. His son Barrent signed the Declaration of Independence in November of 1776 and served at the Provincial Congress. After the British occupied Long Island, Barrent wasn’t feeling as patriotic and returned his allegiance to the King until after the war.

Barrent’s older brother, Leffert, served as the town clerk of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. He kept the town records in the second story of the family mansion in Bedford. At the outbreak of the war, his assistant, John Rapalje, a British loyalist, came to the house and told Lefferts’ wife Dorothy Cowenhoven that he wanted to move the town records to a safe place. For several hours, Rapalje sorted through the papers, choosing the ones that would be most valuable, then promptly absconded with the papers, rowing over the East River and then fleeing to Canada to cross the Atlantic to England.

Town tradition and Henry Reed Stiles’s 1867 A History of the City of Brooklyn holds that his granddaughter, accompanied by her husband, William Weldon, brought the records back from England around 1810. They offered to sell them back to the city for $10,000, but the civic leaders balked, and many of Brooklyn’s colonial records remain lost to this day.

The lack of documentation didn’t keep Brooklyn from romanticizing the past though. At the height of its glory in 1915, the armory was the venue for the city’s premiere event: The Brooklyn Historical Pageant. On a Friday morning in May, nearly 7,000 people braved the rain and mist to witness a production that featured 1,300 performers and a chorus of over a thousand, reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The weekly Brooklyn Life praised the production, noting that “it was unquestionably the biggest and most elaborate of the kind ever carried out in Brooklyn and perhaps anywhere in the country.”

Martin H. Weyrauch, the playwright and a staff member of the Eagle, wrote in the program that he hoped to reveal a city “proud of its past, confident of its future.” The performance featured eight episodes with titles like The Spirit of Nature Reigns, The Canarsie Indians, The Spirit of Nature Dethroned, and Bruekelen Town. A melodramatic history of Brooklyn unfolded: Canarsie Indians listened to a medicine man prophecy of the “arrival of the pale faces,” elderly Civil War veterans known as the “red-legged devils” took the stage to thunderous applause, and ladies from the Women’s Suffrage Party carried a banner during the postlude depicting “The Future.”

The audience included acting Brooklyn mayor George McAneny, and everyone watched “spellbound and altogether charmed.”

While the armory no longer attracts Brooklyn’s aristocracy, it may soon regain a bit of its theatrical glory. As part of the Department of Homeless Services’ effort to open its doors to the public, Theater of War Productions is eyeing the old space as a venue for a performance for the armory’s residents. The company uses classic Greek literature to spark discussions on modern social issues like gun violence or post-traumatic stress disorder. Actors dramatically read a classic play, and then the audience discusses how the play struck them personally.

As Marjolaine Goldsmith, the company manager for Theater of War Productions, toured the armory, she smiled when she found a room that could be used for the performance. It’s a long hall with original wooden floors, a high ceiling, and a skylight. Both walls are lined with doors that lead to the rooms where the men sleep, waiting to hear if they can move out of the castle.

“This is perfect,” she said.

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

Exterior of the armory today.

The 47th Regiment Armory on Marcy Avenue has loomed over its neighbors since 1883. The brick-layered building with crenelated turrets occupies an entire block, bounded by Marcy Avenue to the South, Harrison to the north, Heyward Street to the west and Lynch to the east. Up until 2011, when the federal government consolidated several regiments, the armory served as the drill hall for a branch of the New York National Guard.

Although the State of New York still owns the building, it has occasionally hosted community events but mainly serves as a film set for Hollywood blockbusters like The Amazing Spider Man 2 and Noah. Some days, the armory’s garage doors are open and crew members can be seen wheeling equipment into the spacious former drill hall. Concealed beneath the foundation of the imposing structure, however, are the remnants of the site’s mostly forgotten but more intriguing past.

Long before soldiers filled the armory’s halls, the forebears of Jackie Robinson, Duke Snyder, Pee Wee Reese, and other Brooklyn baseball heroes graced this tract of land. Nothing commemorates this particular history, but for nearly two decades, from 1862 until the armory’s construction in 1883, Lot 2233 was the Union Grounds, a popular skating pond and baseball field that hosted the Grand Old Game before the Brooklyn Dodgers or their home stadium on Ebbets Field even existed.

By the time Union Grounds opened as a recreational venue, baseball had been a popular sport  over a decade.Was the game a local invention? Baseball’s origins remain heavily debated, but historian Thomas W. Gilbert, an expert on Brooklyn’s baseball past, writes that the modern version of the sport “took shape between 1855 and 1870…in and around New York City and Brooklyn.” In fact, the rivalry between what were then-separate cities helped spark the sport’s popularity. That an estimated 3,000 spectators came out on May 16, 1862 for the inaugural exhibition game at Union Grounds was no surprise.

* * *

The earliest records of the site date back to 1699, when the lot was most likely marshland. Over the next century and a half it changed hands among many of Brooklyn’s most famous aristocrats — the Remsens, the Scholes, the Johnsons, the Cammeyers, the Wyckoffs. The conveyances show no known evidence of any development on the site until 1861.

That year, William H.B. Cammeyer obtained a lease for the land from his father, the well-respected leather merchant John E. Cammeyer, and several other proprietors. It was the son who had the vision to turn the empty hollow into a baseball field and skating pond. Those who knew William, known as “Cap,” described him as a “genial, whole-souled man” who “was as happy as the little children who visited his resort.” The recreational park drew great crowds. Skating was as popular in winter as baseball was in the spring, summer and fall.

In the winter, the pond was “a model for pleasure and comfort,” the most popular skating pond in Brooklyn. Visitors of all ages and skill levels would first step into a warm, well-ventilated room with three large always-burning stoves where they could lace up their skates. The waiting room also contained a restaurant, and a man referred to as “Old Bamberry” would whip up his eponymous cakes, a special favorite of the children.

Print of Union Skating Pond from 1863 (NYPL Digital Collection)

In the middle of the ice, music rang out from a Chinese pagoda filled with lamps that emitted a warm glow. “It was indeed like looking through a kaleidoscope,” reads one nostalgic Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from 1893, ten years after the pond’s closing, “watching the ever changing groups of beautiful colors and symmetrical forms.” Certain nights of the skating season were set apart for carnivals that seemed to attract “the entire population of Williamsburgh.”    

* * *

Cammeyer’s project is considered the first enclosed ballpark in history and it became a point of pride for the neighborhood as it achieved its primary objective: “to provide a suitable place for ball playing, where ladies can witness the game without being annoyed by the indecorous behavior of the rowdies who attend some of the first-class matches.”

Squads at every level played on the field, including collegiate, amateur, and professional teams. But it was the Eckford Club of Brooklyn which truly made the Grounds their home, occupying the field from its opening year in 1862 until the club disbanded in 1872. The Brooklyn Historical Society has a scrapbook from the now defunct Eckford Social Club, which existed for more than eight decades after the baseball team folded. From its pages, we learn that the first field the baseball team played on in April 1856 was the vacant corner of a Greenpoint shipyard.  The club, which initially consisted mainly of shipwrights, took its name from Henry Eckford, a Scottish-American naval architect for both the United States and the Ottoman Empire who rose to prominence due to the success of his ships in the War of 1812.  Later, the team moved to play on grounds at what was then Calvary Street in front of an old manor house owned by the Berkus family. The Greenpoint field, then known as the Old Manor House Grounds, is now McGolrick Park.

Eckford was one of the top clubs in Brooklyn, a city which one of the team’s players, Ed “Pincher” Brown, described in a scrapbook clipping as having “furnished more ballplayers than any city in the Union, and all good ones.” Another of the team’s best players and the most famous was Frank Pidgeon, the club’s first president, who baffled opposing hitters with “clever underhand pitching.” Pidgeon was also an ardent defender of keeping the sport amateur — he often spoke with nostalgia about his early playing days. “We would forget business and everything else on Tuesday afternoons,” he said, “go out on those green fields, don our ball suits, and go at it with a rush. At such times we were boys again.” He lost interest when the sport became a business.

The club, which was part of the National Association of Base Ball Players along with several other teams from Brooklyn and New York, was able to upgrade its venue when Cammeyer welcomed Eckford to make Union Grounds their base. The new home paid off immediately. That year, the fifth official season of the association, Cammeyer spearheaded the league

s first championship series, a three-game series that took place throughout the season. In seasons prior, the team with the best record was awarded the title.

A Leslie’s print from 1865 depicting the game between Atlantic and Eckford at the Union Grounds. Framing the scene are drawing’s of the era’s most famous players. (Scanned from The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History.)

An estimated 5,000 spectators cheered from the sidelines as Eckford pitcher Joe Sprague led the team to victory against its greatest rival and defending champion, The Atlantics, in the first game. The Atlantics evened the series in the second game at the Capitoline Grounds in present day Brownsville. Clippings from the scrapbook tell of how the rubber match was postponed because Eckford refused to play without Sprague, who, as a member of the 15th regiment, was fighting in the Civil War. So, the teams agreed to wait until he received a 15-day furlough. Apparently, combat had no ill effect on Sprague’s pitching abilities and he put together a terrific outing in front of a vast crowd, securing an 8-3 victory and the silver ball that Cammeyer had chosen as the victor’s spoils. Eckford defended its title the next year, before the Atlantics stormed back and took three straight in the years that followed.

A portrait of the Atlantic Club, the 1865 champions. (Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame)

Over time, the game grew into the business that Pidgeon deplored, signaling a turn toward the future of organized sports. In 1864, Cammeyer decided to enclose the Union Grounds and began charging for admission — there is some discrepancy in terms of pricing, but it appears to have started at a dime per head.

Union Grounds was the venue for many great games, including an historic 1869 contest between the Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first professional team, and the Brooklyn-based New York Mutuals. Storied clubs from all over Brooklyn and across the country came to play the Brooklyn clubs, including teams from Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. The Ivy League championships were also played at The Union Grounds on occasion and alumni would flock to the field to watch the university nines from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, including one 1869 game between Harvard and Yale which ended with an outlandish 41-24 score. In 1879, Daft’s English Cricket club played its first ever baseball game against the Providence Baseball Club; their “errors were ludicrous” and Providence won 15-1 after just five innings when the game was called for darkness. In spite of their follies, the cricketers “excited great laughter and applause” from the crowd.

The Association began permitting player payment in the 1869 and 1870 seasons, and the players began to receive a percentage of the admission profits. By 1871, the Association gave way to the precursor of the National League, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Eckford did not participate in the 1871 professional season and though a team with the same name played in the 1872 season, it quickly disbanded and the storied club had finally run its course. The Brooklyn social club by the same name lasted until 1956.

The Mutuals initially came from the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey but moved to the Union Grounds in 1868 and played there for the next eight years, until its last season in 1876, when Cammeyer became its short-lived manager. The Atlantics, the old dynasty from the amateur days, moved from the Capitoline Grounds to the Union Grounds in 1873, but only continued playing there in an official capacity until 1875. Cammeyer, seeking to keep professional baseball going at the grounds, helped bring the Hartford Dark Blues over to Brooklyn from Connecticut in 1877, but the gambit lasted only a single season.

* * *

In those early years of professionalism, misconduct was prevalent throughout the clubs, causing the public to sour on the sport during the 1870s. An article in the Brooklyn Eagle recalled how  “corrupt practices on the part of the ball players at last destroyed popular interest in the noble game and matches became gradually less frequent until they seemed to have ceased altogether.”

At some point, Cammeyer had cordoned off a section of the grounds as a bettors’ ring. This led to one particularly dreadful instance in September of 1876, reported by The New York Times. The annual “picked nine” game — that is, a scheduled exhibition game in which two captains selected their side for a single game — between the best players from Brooklyn and New York. The fishy business began when two New York players, were designated with selecting the representatives from each city, as opposed to one man from New York and the other from Brooklyn. Both captains then selected a disproportionate number of players from just two clubs. The betting originally favored the New York side, but shortly before the game, the odds flipped to the “Brooklyn” team. In the first inning, New York’s center fielder (who was one of the captains), allowed an easy fly ball to pass right through his outstretched hands and, after he refused to catch another easy out, his own pitcher stopped play and openly accused the man of throwing the game. New York’s pitcher and a few other players wanted to leave the field and call the game, but they were convinced to continue.

The New York Captain received even more vitriol from the crowd after he tried to push an opposing player off third base and the crowd called for his ejection, though he remained on the field. In the final inning, New York’s third baseman — who throughout the game had been making wild throws to first base — stepped up to the plate and laced a fastball down the middle for a base hit. But he “did little more than walk around the bases, each of which from first to third, he failed to touch, when, if he cared to, he could easily have made a home run.” He had no choice but to score the tying run after the following batter poked another hit.

With the game tied, the pitchers from New York and Brooklyn shook hands and, “refusing to engage in such a disgraceful affair walked off the field.” The umpire called the game a draw — leaving the betters in limbo. After the game, several players continued throw out accusations of foul play and police had to be called in to break up the ensuing scuffle. The Times called the whole game “the most disreputable proceeding” ever on display at the Union Grounds.

The scandal was not the end of baseball at the Grounds; games continued to be played at the site over the next few years, but the enthusiasm for the sport — and for ice skating — waned. The site had become a far cry from its halcyon days, when carnival skaters formed “one great ferment of rapidly intermingling gods, goddesses, gnomes, devils, kings, and cobblers, in all varieties of color and costume” and baseball fans formed “a strong and constant stream,” filling “all the avenues of approach” to the Grounds.  

For a time, there was hope that the Grounds would become a public park, but with the 47th regiment looking for a new armory site, the State of New York purchased the land. When demolition began on the Grounds, the baseball fences vanished and the skating pond buildings disintegrated into nothing but “a mass of beams and boards.” Cammeyer died in his home at 44 Macron Street 15 years later at the age of 78, never in that time to be involved in the sport again.

* * *

The armory, consisting of load-bearing brick with a limestone trim, was originally designed by architect William Mundell (with later additions in 1899 designed by Isaac Perry). Construction began in 1883 — the cornerstone was laid on October 11 of that year — and the 47th Regiment was able to occupy the building by 1885. A building structure inventory form conducted in 1992 by the New York Parks and Recreation department’s historic preservation division described the interior as “relatively simple and utilitarian” compared to New York City’s other armories, but with a “high degree of integrity of design, materials and craftsmanship.” Its utilitarian design came in handy, as the armory was host to several banquets and athletic events over the years.

Armory Drill Hall. )New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center).

The 47th Regiment, a volunteer infantry unit which drilled at the armory and consisted of local Brooklyn men, was originally organized in 1862 and served in the Civil War, first stationed at Fort McHenry in Baltimore and then in Washington, D.C. as part of the 3rd Brigade.

When the Great Brooklyn Trolley Strike of 1895 turned violent, the 47th Regiment — and every other National Guard unit in the city — was called into active duty in order to quell any further outbursts. They assembled at the armory and remained on strike duty for over two weeks.

Three years later, at the tail-end of the Spanish-American War when the United States established a formal military presence and took control over Puerto Rico, the regiment received orders to head to the island. In October, its soldiers embarked from Newport, Rhode Island on the transport ship The Manitoba, and reached Ponce, Puerto Rico two days later.

When the regiment arrived at their camp about two miles northeast of the city, other soldiers jokingly warned them that bands of guerrilla fighters were spread out through the surrounding hills. That evening The Times reported, G.A. Smith, a private from Brooklyn, took his fellow soldiers seriously and thought he saw three men attempting to climbing the camp’s fence. He fired. His fellow soldiers heard the shots and, “eager to join the fray,” began shooting as well, mainly at cornstalks. Most of them had never fired a gun before. They wouldn’t get a chance again, as they were stripped of their weapons. Soon after, another “accidental” shooting took place — this time, a Private, John Valentine, was shot through the shoulder and neck by 1st Lieutenant Arthur Meyer. It is not known whether he survived.  

Things calmed down for the 47th after that — their main duties consisted of garrisoning small towns within a 50-mile radius of San Juan. Despite the fact that the regiment’s commander, Col. William H. Hubbell, declared that the people of Puerto Rico were unable to govern themselves and the island was “reeking of sedition” when they left, the soldiers themselves had more issues with the island’s fleas. Most of the regiment returned home in March of 1899 in good health, bringing with them a variety of pets, including dogs, ponies, parrots, chickens, and monkeys. Their fellow Brooklynites lined the streets, as the soldiers disembarked from The Manitoba and marched to the armory, where a great crowd of 10,000 people awaited them.

Some drama took place at the armory in 1909, when a machinist of the 47th regiment named Frederick Kopp took ill and died. The young man’s parents and doctor argued that he had been sick for some time when a few of his colleagues came to his home in Williamsburg, forced him from his sick bed into their car, and drove him to the armory’s annual inspection wrapped in a blanket. “We’re soldiers. We’re responsible for this. Get out of the way,” the men purportedly told Kopp’s father as he tried to intervene. When it appeared that Kopp was too sick to participate in the inspection, the regiment’s Captain, John DeWitt Kleymer, ordered the men to return the private to his home. Along the way, they stopped at a local saloon for a drink and left Kopp shivering in their vehicle. The young private died two days later after contracting pneumonia. The 47th responded that the accusations were exaggerated and that, while indeed sickly, Kopp had gone on his own accord despite his mother’s protests. Eventually the regiment was not found responsible.

The armory also was caught up in the midst of an ideological battle on the eve of World War I. On March 13, 1917, the New York Tribune reported that pacifist activists campaigned for weeks, hosting mass meetings, distributing flyers and picketing the school, in an attempt to prevent a group of 300 high school boys from marching in their first military drill at the armory. But much to the pacifists’ chagrin, nearly every boy from the school, who was of age, turned out and those under the age of sixteen protested vociferously.

The rest of the century remained fairly quiet for the armory. Members of the National Guard continued to drill there weekly, high school athletes competed in track and basketball, and boxers duked it out in the ring.

In 2013, two years after New York’s National Guard was consolidated, the Hasidic Satmars in the neighborhood put together a bid to purchase the site from the Empire State Development Corporation, to alleviate “the perennial space crunch in its schools and synagogues.” The plan was for the armory to serve as the location for a yeshiva, housing, and a community hall. The sect had already used the armory on a few occasions, including the celebration of the anniversary of the escape from Nazi-Occupied Hungary of its founder, Joel Teitelbaum. At the time, two factions of the Satmars, the Zaloynim and the Aroynem, were embroiled in a bitter schism with financial overtones. Some members of the community viewed their joint bid for the armory as a possible step toward reconciliation, but the sale was never made final and the site remains under the control of the New York State Military and Naval Affairs.

Today, the armory’s neighborhood is bustling with family life. In the early mornings, the sidewalks are filled with children on their way to school, waiting on the corners patiently for the go ahead from their crossing guards. The surrounding architecture is charming and well-preserved. But there is little green space anywhere — just concrete, asphalt, and brick. Except, that is, for a small lawn in front of the armory’s former entrance hall. Despite the onset of winter, and the barren trees that are sprouting up from this little oasis, the grass remains surprisingly green — as if it’s preparing for spring, and the crack of leather against wood.

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

(Photo: Emily Corona)

Sol Graf was a vital-looking 36-year-old Jew in 1966 who, in the company of his wife and two daughters, boarded the Greek ship Olympia from the Israeli port of Haifa and headed for New York City to start a new life. In a black-and-white photo taken aboard the ship, Graf smiles relaxedly at the camera while sitting at a table with his family and two other companions. The image belies his horrific early life experiences trying to survive the concentration camps of World War II. The war, and his boarding the ship, would forever change the course of his life in ways that he himself would later describe as “immeasurable and unbelievable.”

Once in New York, Graf and his wife advanced, slowly but surely. Thanks to his degree in industrial engineering, he got a low-paying job in that field and, in just a few years, he secured a job as general manager of a plastics firm with about 100 employees located at the tip of Greenpoint. The New York Post reported that his hiring practices were “admirable, providing well-paying jobs to a new” community of East European Jewish immigrants.

The plastics factory where this all took place was Nuhart & Co. Inc., on the block located between Dupont and Clay across from the Greenpoint Playground and a few feet from Newtown Creek. It had been a manufacturing site since the late 19th century, housing, at various times, a boiler shop for Logan Ironworks, a gas and light fixture factory, sheet metal works, a soap factory, a waterproofing factory, a scrap metal facility and stables. The business would become Graf’s livelihood for the rest of his life. He worked there for at least two decades. Then, on September of 1983, public records show that the entity 49 Dupont Realty Corp bought the property from Dynamit Nobel-Harte Inc. The company continued to work with plastics until it shut down in 2004. Media outlets point out that the buyer was Graf, but since the land was bought and sold as a corporation, it is risky to make this claim with the public information available.

Sol Graf and his family, plus two companions, aboard the Greek ship Olympia in 1966. (Source: Shoah Foundation)

Trying to tie these pieces together, I reached out and spoke to archivist Emma Sarconi, Reference Professional for Special Collections at Princeton University. “Blank spaces can sometimes tell us more than concrete answers,” she said by chat. “Like what does it tell you that he bought the land as a corporation instead of an individual? That’s valuable information because he made that choice for a reason.” Without speculating about Graf’s motives, it is still safe to assume that 49 Dupont Realty Corp was somehow related to Graf’s family, because the president of the factory in 1983 shared Graf’s wife’s maiden name.

But, moving on…

Located in a neighborhood with a history written by tides of immigrants and linked to individual stories of triumph and resilience, the factory is a place where Graf and so many others found a path to the American dream. The ironic flipside is that it was a significant source of air pollution. Even though it closed more than a decade ago, it remains one of the most contaminated sites in New York State. In 2010, the state government declared the area a Superfund site—called that way because of a federal government program designed to fund the cleanup of locations with hazardous substances. Dangerous plastic compounds had leaked into the soil and groundwater from the underground storage tanks that were abandoned after Nuhart stopped operations.

Since then, “It’s essentially just been laying there,” Mike Schade of the Northern Brooklyn Neighbors organization told Bedford + Bowery. “This is a toxic legacy that’s been left behind that we are now trying to get cleaned up.”

(Photo: Emily Corona)

Before the Nuhart site became synonymous with toxicity, it welcomed waves of Jews, Polish, Russian and Italian immigrants, looking for jobs in the factories, furnaces, shops and foundries. The gentle-mannered Graf, now 88, came with a latter day wave of 73,000 Jewish immigrants that debarked between 1960 and 1968, coming mostly from Israel, Cuba and the Near East. Before his life story was recorded by the Shoah Foundation in 1995, Graf had never really spoken about the death, hunger and even cannibalism he saw as a Jewish teenager held prisoner in places like Auschwitz. “I didn’t feel that anybody was especially interested or ready to listen to a story of two or three hours and somehow I didn’t feel that it was terribly interesting to anybody,” Graf said back then. Bedford + Bowery was unable to reach Graf, now living in New Jersey, for comment on this story.

In his oral history, videotaped in his home, he, at 65, reflected on the war and the tremendous cost Jews paid. “If this all hadn’t happened, where I would be?” he wondered out loud. He thought of his childhood growing up with a father weak with tuberculosis. Of the small estate in his birth town of Mosonmagyaróvár in west Hungary, Graf expressed gratitude. If “this all” hadn’t happened, he imagined he would still be in his hometown, “doing nothing, reaching nowhere.” But the war and being a survivor of the Holocaust had given him the experience of leaving Hungary, to live in Israel and later in the United States.

For decades if not centuries, gumption like Graf’s fueled the spirit of this little corner of New York. The New York Times interviewed him in 1993 as part of a story about a subsequent wave of immigrants, the post-Soviets who arrived in New York at the time. Graf hired many of them to work at Nuhart. The newspaper spoke with Yakov Borisevich Alesker, a man with 40 patents in construction techniques who had a prolific academic in the Soviet Union. He “could have been basking in the accumulated glory of a long career at a prestigious Soviet engineering institute,” the Times said. Instead, he found himself “near the bottom of the ladder” at a Brooklyn manufacturing plant.

So, to trace the history of the Nuhart site is to trace the footsteps of the influx of immigrants to Greenpoint, bringing with them their traditions, languages, histories and dreams. The first to arrive in the 1600s were the Dutch and French Huguenots, who massacred and pushed out the Lenape Native Americans. In their resistance to colonization, the Lenape burned down the first Dutch attempt at a settlement on the banks of Newtown Creek. The white settlers owned slaves and farmed the fertile lands, and as the families grew in size, their descendants took control of the shipping business that became Greenpoint’s economic mainstay in the 1800s.

Centuries before Graf made his livelihood through the production of vinyl products, the block and lots where the 1930s building is located belonged to a single family whose dynasty began with a French Huguenot named Pieter Praa. He acquired most of the land in Greenpoint in the late 1600s, either through marriage to Maria Hay—who inherited land from her father—or through purchase.

Even today, reaching Greenpoint can be tricky. Its protruded shape is located in the same latitude as Madison Square Park in Manhattan, but separated by the East River. Only one train crosses the river, the G, with stops at Nassau and Greenpoint. The isolation has a history, too. Early settlers in Greenpoint “had to travel a circuitous route to reach Bushwick Village, near today’s Metropolitan and Bushwick avenues, the closest place to find a church, store or school,” reads a passage in the Greenpoint Neighborhood History Guide, edited in 2001 by the Brooklyn Historical Society.

While Praa left no son to carry on his name, his four daughters and their husbands inherited the property. During the American Revolution, these families constituted the entire population of the neighborhood and are still present in the names of some of the streets that run past the sites of the original farms: Meserole, Calyer; Provost. The forefather of the Meseroles was Jean, born in France, probably in Picardy, around the year 1640. He died in Greenpoint in 1695. A document compiled by Andrew J. Provost on the early settlers and the descendants of Bushwick, Long Island, and New York indicates that in 1663 Jean Meserole traveled to New York—back then known as New Amsterdam—aboard a ship, The Spotted Cow, with his wife and infant son. The plot of land where he eventually settled was a high bluff of 128 acres “near to and facing” the river called the Kijkuit or Keikout farm, meaning lookout in Lenape, in what is now South 4th Street in Williamsburg.

Photograph of map “Farm Line, Map of the City of Brooklyn,” from 1874. Note the pale contours of the farms of “Heirs of John Meserole” through which Franklin and Dupont Streets were later traced.

Jean Meserole’s grandson, Jan, inherited the property and lived in the area with his wife and 10 children. In 1727, his father-in-law, Pieter Praa, sold Jan about 80 acres higher up in Greenpoint, making Jan “the largest landowner in the Town of Bushwick,” according to the historical document compiled by Andrew J. Provost in 1949. The Meseroles grew in local prominence. By 1827, an Abraham Meserole was named Secretary of the Board of Williamsburg. A pamphlet published in 1847 listing “the solid men of Williamsburgh” attached a worth of $20,000 to a David M. Meserole.

The rapid transformation of the land came after the War of 1812 and the Treaty of Ghent, which opened the seas to trade. Manufacturers of steam engines and iron foundries streamed into Greenpoint, and a man named Neziah Bliss seized this opportunity, seeing the potential of Greenpoint’s shoreline. Bliss married Mary Meserole in 1832, inheriting her land and gaining a foothold along the riverfront. Bliss came from Connecticut, and became prominent in the manufacturing of marine engines as the farmland started to be partitioned into streets and lots. Thousands of men and boys “in lumber yards, sawmills and shipyards lifted, sawed, planed and carved the wood by hand,” as the Greenpoint harbor filled with tall-masted ships.

Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Eagle recorded the happenings in the streets, documenting life in the area. On July 14, 1859, the Eagle’s City News and Gossip column reported that three men had drowned because they presumably did not know how to swim and children playing with matches started a fire near straw bed close on Franklin Avenue. “The body of a man was picked up at Bay Ridge yesterday morning. He had no clothes, and it is therefore supposed was drowned while bathing. He was about five feet six inches in height, 25 years of age, and had sandy hair, whiskers and moustache,” read one item.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the Meserole farm in Greenpoint had been broken down into streets, and block 2487 was marked off by the Manhattan Avenue to the east, and by the Dupont, Franklin and Clay Streets to the north, west and south. It was a few feet away from block 2487 where, in 1902, in the rear room of Dennis Gildea’s Saloon at 110 Franklin Street, young Thomas McLoughlin, who lived nearby,  put a whisky bottle to his mouth and never took it out until he reeled and fell on his back. The Eagle described the 24-year-old as “a good workman” who “earned good wages,” but had fallen “victim of the drink habit” and become tired of the struggle. He made efforts to get on his feet again, while the others in the saloon laughed at first and then stood “terror stricken, watching him die.”

How block 2487 looked in 1929.

The Eagle did not say where McLoughlin was employed, but he easily could have been one of the laborers who worked in one of the nearby businesses in block 2487. The Desk Atlas Borough of Brooklyn of the City of New York of 1929 shows that by the early 1900s, the block had been subdivided into more than 80 lots. Fledgling companies—with names like Hopwood Retinning, Post & McCord or Steel Construction—were working steel, metal or iron. The transformation was fast and massive. So many Polish, Russian and Italian immigrants had moved in by that time, that 40 percent of Greenpoint’s inhabitants came from abroad, and more than 80 percent were first generation Americans. In 1919, William Felter said the era of shipbuilding and artisanry was over. He described Greenpoint as a place of “smoking skies, blazing blasts from fiery furnaces, the never ceasing machinery in a hundred factories, where thousands of laborers spend their busy days… today is the era of factories, furnaces, shops and foundries.”

Land conveyance records for block 2487, up to the 1960s.

Considering all these transformations, it’s remarkable that the Nuhart site has remained relatively unchanged since it was built in 1930, according to city records. The property, belonging originally to Harte and Company, was developed for plastic manufacturing sometime in the late 1940s to early 1950s. The first mention of Harte & Co in land conveyance records occurs on December 3, 1945, then again in 1948, and progressively more often as the company bought up lots during the growth of the plastics industry. The photo unit of the NYC Department of Records no longer has the black-and-white photograph taken for tax purposes between 1939 and 1941. Nonetheless, the tax record photos from the 1980s show the building as it stands today, a 31,000-square-foot blonde brick structure with the “Harte & Company” sign still emblazoned in silver lettering.

The Nuhart site in the 1980s, as shown by a photo taken for tax purposes in the 1980s.

That will all change soon. Though it seems to be altogether abandoned, the building is perfectly sealed from the outside world and a closer look at the doors of the construction show shining new locks. The property has been changing hands in recent years. With a sale price of $23.25 million, city records show that in 2014, the entity 49 Dupont Realty Corp—headed by Graf’s relative Joseph Folkman—sold the property to Dupont Street Developers LLC. Then, earlier this year the All Year Management developers bought the site from a group of investors for $55 million, and the Real Deal reported that the current developers want the superfund site to give way to 325 apartments.

On a winter Tuesday morning, the streets surrounding the Nuhart site are simultaneously quiet and bustling with activity. Few cars or pedestrians are out for a stroll, but dozens of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking construction workers cross Clay Street to and fro, from a steaming coffee and breakfast cart parked at the corner of the Nuhart site, to another massive construction area just a few hundred feet away on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Curiously enough, it is the redevelopment of the old plastics factory that is prompting a comprehensive cleanup of the chemical compounds that have seeped from the underground storage tanks. All Year Management is working with the state Department of Environmental Conservation to clean up the toxic plume that is spreading underneath the factory. In an interview, Mike Schade of the Northern Brooklyn Neighbors organization, said that it may take the developers from 5 to 10 years to eradicate the pollutants. Once that happens, though, the wrecking ball will tear down the curved 1930s art modern façade of the Nuhart site. And the face of Greenpoint will be transformed once more.

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

A view of the Greenpoint Hospital complex from across Jackson Street, on the corner with Kingsland Ave. On the right are buildings owned by the Neighborhood Women Legacy Project, one of the original founders of GREC.

This past September, New York City’s housing department announced plans to convert the entirety of the long-abandoned Greenpoint Hospital complex into over 500 units of affordable housing and 200 units of housing for the homeless. The new project grows out of a nearly three-decade battle between the city and a number of Greenpoint neighborhood community organizations. But a deeper look at the history of this plot of land reveals that the complex’s commitment to working class, underserved families reaches further back. The recent announcement to transform this historic and often contentious space into a community-supported and designed project represents a victorious new chapter in a longstanding legacy.

Contamination and Contention: Greenpoint Hospital’s Gluey Beginnings

Lot 2885, the hospital complex site, is less than a mile from Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile long tributary of the East River that borders Brooklyn and Queens. The 146,100-square-foot complex consist of vacant land and three buildings bordered by Jackson Street, Debevoise Avenue, Maspeth Avenue and Kingsland Avenue. In 1642, there were Dutch and Quaker settlements around this creek, a fertile area for crops and livestock until the 1850s and 1860s when the industrial revolution took off—as did evolution of this particularly storied site.

To this day, there are factories all up and down Newtown Creek that date back to the end of the 19th century. The old Greenpoint Hospital is less than a 15-minute walk from the English Kills, one of the most heavily industrialized man-made tributaries of Newtown Creek and one of the most polluted sites in all of the United States. In the 1860s, the city built the Montauk Branch of the Long Island Rail Road to service the port. Although parts of Newtown Creek are calm and would make for perfect summer day recreation or waterfront residential living, the water is still so incredibly contaminated that is not fit for use. The now abandoned hospital building is less than a mile away.

As early as 1891, a good two decades before the factory closed down, the then Brooklyn Health Commissioner, John Griffin, called out the factory for its “offensive odors” that were a “ serious detriment of the health of the residents of the fifteenth ward. The smell was both “nauseating and deathly” and caused “many cases of sickness.”

In November 1899, the Brooklyn Eagle published a somewhat satirical article under the headline, “Some Picturesque Aspects of Odorous Newtown Creek.” The writer argued that Newtown Creek was so much more polluted, vile and “positively wicked” than the Chicago River that the Chicago habit of nose-pinching with little silver clothespins to avoid the river’s stench would prove futile at Newtown Creek. Refuse from the “fertilizer factories, chemical works, soap factories, oil refineries, many other high smelling establishments” had made the creek so malodorous that even a “blind man” could figure out what industries were polluting the body of water. Most overpowering of all the, the unnamed writer wrote, was glue, emanating from the factory of Peter Cooper, a name enshrined in parks and on buildings across the city.

Cooper’s Glue Factory, one of the largest in the city, operated from the mid 1840s until 1915, when Cooper  moved the operation first to Queens and then to Gowanda, a town near Buffalo. In February of 1915, Peter Cooper’s Company announced it would demolish nearly all of the factory’s 30 buildings over 16 acres, which, the Eagle said, “hindered development in that section for a long time.” Because of the contamination in the area, there had been almost no residential development east of Morgan Avenue.

By the 1930s, the factory remained a surprising source of nostalgia for the communities of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, with some residents waxing poetic about the childhood days playing among the barrels of glue on the roofs of some of the buildings until supervisors chased them away. The factory’s legacy of danger and contamination would live on at Greenpoint Hospital throughout its nearly 70 years in operation, from 1915 to 1982.

Kings County Hospitals: A Legacy of Negligence and Corruption

From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · Dec 29, 1915, Wed · Page 5

In the summer of 1913, as Cooper’s factory relocated, construction on the hospital began. The hospital is actually misnamed: “It is not situated in Greenpoint for its site on Kingsland and Debevoise avenues, Jackson and Bullion streets is wholly within the limits of Williamsburg,” the Eagle helpfully corrected in January 1915. Today the complex, overlooking Cooper Park, would be considered located in East Williamsburg. Upon the complex’s completion, although it was not the largest hospital in Brooklyn compared to the Kings County Hospital, Greenpoint was considered “the most modern” of all the New York facilities, the Eagle said.

But John A. Kingsbury, the Kings County Charities Commissioner at the time, begged to differ. In 1914 he conducted a thorough investigation of Brooklyn public hospitals, and although Greenpoint was still under construction at the time, it nevertheless received its fair share of criticism. That July, he publicly denounced Frank J. Helmle, the Brooklyn architect responsible for designing the hospital. Helmle had been most recently under scrutiny for having laid foundations for a hospital on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island that was too shallow to be structurally sound. He also faced rebuke for many of his design decisions for Greenpoint.

Kingsbury’s investigation also revealed a wider pattern of negligence and corruption within the Brooklyn public hospital system. His appalling report described overcrowded rooms with no sunlight, patients sleeping on floors without mattresses or sleeping on wooden benches, and mis-tagged corpses that would be buried under the wrong name. In the same investigation, Kingsbury also discovered widespread instances of petty graft, including staff members who required patients to pay fees for services covered by the city. The report also detailed violations at private Brooklyn hospitals. In one astonishing case, a Catholic hospital had attempted to charge the city for the maintenance of a patient who had been dead for over six months.

By December 1915, Kingsbury pushed to reorganize the boards of hospitals all across Brooklyn. He ordered the resignation of hundreds of doctors, who protested vehemently. Some accused Kingsbury of ulterior political motives —but Kingsbury insisted that “his only purpose was to end an undesirable system.” The newest public hospital serving Greenpoint and Williamsburg would be the first to open its doors under Kingsbury’s new board of doctors. As its construction neared completion, the commissioner wondered: would the brand new facility fall into the same patterns of gross negligence?        

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, Kings, New York) · Jan 3, 1915, Sun · Page 64.

Filling a Dire Workers’ Need

Construction crews completed the work early in 1915, but despite a dire local need for medical services in the surrounding communities, authorities delayed the scheduled Feb. 1 opening by several months. And what was the reason for the delay? “No one seems to know exactly,” the Eagle reported in May. Kingsbury blamed the Brooklyn Contract Supervision Bureau, saying that the agency had been far more exacting in its labor regulations than required for private operations. Even though Kingsbury tried to expedite the process by foregoing the usual process of public letting required for the purchase of tables, beds, furniture, and general hospital equipment, the delay consumed the better part of an entire year. Local communities protested the delays. In April 1915, the Emerald Gaelic Society complained in a letter to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel “that the lives of 90,000 residents of Greenpoint are menaced constantly seems to be unworthy of due consideration by the parties responsible for this outrageous delay.”

Bureaucrats appeared to be overlooking or downplaying how dangerous the industrialization of Newtown Creek continued to be to the health and wellbeing of the area’s working class.

Local residents expected Greenpoint Hospital to “fill a long-felt want in what [was] probably the most densely populated section of the city,” not to mention the borough’s chief industrial and manufacturing center. The distance and traffic delays from the nearest three hospitals—all located in Williamsburg—was a constant problem. In August 1900, before the glue factory moved out of the neighborhood, boiling glue burned the face and hands of a 16-year-old boy. A few months earlier, 15-year-old John Miller, the “elevator boy,” was caught between the floor and the shaft when the elevator suddenly descended and crushed him to death. The most sensational incident came in 1910 when it took an ambulance three-quarters of an hour to arrive at the scene of a factory accident that left seven workmen dead.

The lack of accessible emergency care in this heavily industrialized area is a classic case of environmental injustice. The city had been drastically underserving the Brooklyn district most vulnerable to widespread contamination and deadly workplace accidents. The choice of location was thus meant to serve the factory workers of all three of Brooklyn’s industrial hubs: Blissville, Laurel Hill and Newtown Creek. When announcing the new hospital, the Brooklyn Eagle lauded that one side of the complex would face the park, meaning that open windows could bring fresh air. On the east side, however, the opposite was true. The building ran against an open stretch that led to Newtown Creek. Many local civic organizations pushed to have the creek drained to stop foul odors from permeating the hospital environment, but this community demand was never met.  

70 Years of Operation

An abandoned section of the Greenpoint Hospital complex that runs along Jackson Street, with a factory chimney. This section will be torn down as part of the new development plan.

Despite the repeated delays and Kingsbury’s critique of the complex’s architecture, advance publicity promoted the new hospital as a state-of-the-art facility, expected to rival Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham and Massachusetts General. The Commissioner of Public Charities John A. Kingsbury announced in September 1915 that the hospital would be “one of the most modern institutions of its kind in the East,” and that it would have its own X-ray equipment and its own post-graduate training school for nurses.

Nonetheless, in 1925, only a decade after the hospital opened, charity posts in the Eagle’s classified ad section sought donations to re-floor the kitchens and fund other renovations. The Eagle reported that Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Public Charities Henry C. Wright called Greenpoint “one of the most awkwardly planned public hospitals he ever saw.”  

Nonetheless, Greenpoint was known for its innovations, some of which would prove ill-thought.  In addition to the nursing school and the X-ray department, in October 1915 the hospital’s superintendent Dr. Charles F. Sanborn unveiled a new “twilight sleep” department. “Twilight sleep,” also known as “Dammerschlaf,” was a new childbirth technique that involved doctors administering a cocktail of morphine and scopolamine designed not only to work as an anesthetic for the mother, but to erase her entire memory of the birth process. American journalists initially welcomed the German-imported practice as a miracle, but it soon fell out of favor. While the women were unconscious, doctors would use forceps to forcibly remove the baby, often injuring both mother and child. In some cases, the infant would fall into respiratory failure or die. The narcotic cocktail sometimes lead women into a state of violent psychosis, and hospital personnel would have to tie them up to keep them from hurting themselves.

On October 4, 1915, the new Greenpoint Hospital, finally—although informally because the building remained half-furnished—opened its doors with 13 employees on its payroll of $15,124. Its very first ambulance call responded to 19-year-old May Keagan, who suffered an acute appendicitis attack. On its first day alone, the hospital sent outo six ambulances and performed one emergency surgery.   

Less than two years into operation, the hospital ran into trouble. A measles outbreak overtook the children’s ward on one of the coldest days of the year. Instead of creating an in-house quarantine, the hospital sent the sick child five miles to Kings County Hospital. The child died in transit. Locals were outraged and demanded that the hospital establish a system that avoided sending sickly children on lengthy ambulance rides.

With such a predominantly working class service area, it wasn’t surprising that the hospital regularly treated victims of electrical accidents from rundown and overcrowded tenement buildings, those injured in instances of police brutality, and others suffering from burns and head trauma caused in work accidents. On Christmas Day 1915, about three months after the hospital first opened, an elevator operator on Wall Street named Robert Tiedemann “shared in the Christmas prosperity of the Street and received more than $100 in presents from tenants,” only to be robbed on the way home of the gifts and his salary for the week. Depressed, he drank enough creosote to end up at Greenpoint nearly dead. Hospital staff managed to pump his stomach in time to save his life.

One of the more interesting events in the hospital’s history was its role in treating a series of victims of a teenage killing spree. In the summer of 1954, violent teenagers who came to be known as the “Thrill Killers,” threw 34-year-old Willard Menter to his death off a bridge over the East River. In August 1954, Jack Koslow, one of the “young sadists” who was 15 at the time, drenched 63-year-old Felix Jukabowski with gasoline and turned him into a human torch for no apparent reason. Greenpoint staff nursed Jukabowski back to life. The American Bar Association blamed the baffling rush of “teenage thrill crimes” on “glamorized vice in television, radio and in comic books.” Four of the young boys were eventually arrested later that August on charges of torture and murder. At parks in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, they beat two more men to death and tortured four young girls with with braided whips.  

But the most famous patient treated at Greenpoint was Frank Serpico, the famed New York City Italian-American cop, best known and beloved for blowing the whistle on the systemic corruption of the New York City Police Department in the 1970s, memorialized in both the 1973 neo-noir biographical crime film Serpico, in which Serpico is played by Al Pacino, and Antonino D’Ambrosio’s recent documentary titled Frank Serpico that was released to high praise last year.  On Feb. 3, 1971, when Serpico was shot in the face during a drug bust on Driggs Avenue he was rushed to Greenpoint Hospital for treatment. New York’s mayor at the time, John Lindsay, paid the beloved cop a visit at Greenpoint and was happy to be informed that Serpico would survive the assault.

Entrance to the northeastern section of the Greenpoint Hospital complex, on the corner of Kingsland Avenue and Jackson Street.

Greenpoint vs. The City of New York

By the time of Serpico’s hospitalization, the Greenpoint Hospital’s days were already numbered. In late December 1967, the State Health Department began threatening forcible closure if health, sanitation, and structural conditions were not greatly improved. Earlier that year, a State Health Department report detailed a variety of unacceptable conditions, such as “unscreened open windows…with pigeon droppings on the window sills” that “resulted in the entrance of pigeon excreta directly into the operating rooms.” Other violations included “filthy” emergency rooms, untrained staff in the pharmacy, an “extremely dirty” butcher shop, and “generally poor housekeeping.”

In the mid-summer of 1979, Mayor Edward Koch announced his plans to close Greenpoint along with three other public hospitals in Harlem and Brooklyn. The mayor said that New York had a surplus of 3,000 hospital beds more than needed, and that the way to improve the city’s municipal health care system was by paring it down. However, Koch’s announcement was met with protest. Although the city had an excess of hospital beds, community members who lived near these hospitals argued that cuts and closures should be made somewhere else in the city— “not where it hurts the poor.” Nevertheless, Greenpoint—the only municipal medical center in North Brooklyn at the time—closed its doors for good in December 1982, even though the Woodhull Hospital that would replace it was not yet open. The vice president of the Professional & Allied Employee Association of Greenpoint, Samuel Bobe, called the closing “premature” and accused the Health and Hospitals Corporation of “jeopardizing health and care in a community comprised basically of poor Blacks and Hispanics.” The environmental injustice ghosts of Peter Cooper’s Glue Factory prevailed—and some of the community organizers who protested the closure of the hospital are still involved in bargaining with the city over the use of the complex today.   

Entrance to the Greenpoint Renaissance Center on the corner of Maspeth and Kingsland Avenues. Previously a section of the old Greenpoint Hospital, both GREC and St. Nick’s Alliance are housed in this building.

Once the hospital closed, community members banded together to form the Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation, commonly known as GREC. The consortium of neighborhood organizations hoped to find strength in numbers and solidarity, to demand community involvement in the redevelopment of the hospital site. Nonetheless, in 1983, despite the efforts to protect the vacant property and develop a community-supported plan for its reuse, the city clandestinely moved 40 homeless men into the vacant buildings without public notice and without the consent of neighborhood residents.  

Before long, the buildings housed upwards of 700 homeless men, with a place to sleep but with virtually no other support services. By 1984, the hospital complex was known as an “extremely violent place for residents” and housed 1,150 men—the largest men’s homeless shelter in the United States at the time. Crime in the surrounding neighborhoods skyrocketed, and the city’s apparent apathy for the well-being of the Cooper Park community left many enraged. Residents subsequently spent 140 nights in vigil outside the complex, with the aim of drawing attention “to the combined injustice to homeless men and the host community.” This was the beginning of a tortured relationship between Greenpoint community members and the City, and what community residents decried, in a version of its original 1984 plan for the site, as the City’s “complete disregard for reasonable community planning concerns.”

Entrance to the northeastern section of the Greenpoint Hospital complex, on the corner of Kingsland Avenue and Jackson Street. The plaques on both columns are in dedication and recognition of the women activists Jan Peterson and Mildred Tudy Johnson , as well as Theresa ‘Tish’ and Guido Cianciotta, for their community organizing in relation to the Greenpoint Hospital.

Justice in the New Life of the Greenpoint Hospital

In May 1989, only after two lawsuits and a mass protest that blocked the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,  Mayor Koch reached an agreement with community members to phase out the homeless shelter over the next five years and phase in the GREC community-supported development plan. When Koch reneged on his promises, the coalition of Greenpoint communities took its case to the Brooklyn Supreme Court and in January 1990, Judge Elizabeth A. Garry forced the city to remove nearly 300 beds and vacate four buildings, as outlined in the GREC redevelopment plan.

Although this was a step in the right direction, the Greenpoint Hospital complex would remain a point of contention for nearly two more decades. Frank Lang, the Director of Housing at St. Nick’s Alliance, explained that this was not a battle easily won. St. Nick’s Alliance is one of the founding members of GREC that started organizing during the hospital’s closure in the early ’80s, and Lang has been involved with the Greenpoint Hospital project since 2006.

In 2007, Lang explained, the city released a request for proposals of how to use the complex. Community members submitted a proposal that outlined GREC’s redevelopment plan, but the city ended up choosing a for-profit development proposal that was not supported by the community.

“It was discovered that the proposal that they designated was not originally feasible, and the city had actually coached that development team to make it feasible,” said Lang. “And even then it was not as adhering to the guidelines as our proposal.” Shortly thereafter, one of the joint venture partners was arrested for bribing the Department of Housing Preservation and Development on a separate matter, and the Greenpoint Hospital project was suspended yet again. “The community ended up settling with the city, but it was just an agreement to not go ahead with any party,” said Lang.

An abandoned section of the Greenpoint Hospital complex, on the corner of Maspeth and Debevoise Avenues. This building will be renovated and made into low-income housing units as part of the GREC-supported new development plan.

Last year the city released another expressions of interest form which again allowed for community members and developers to submit proposals for the project. This one, however, encouraged applicants to submit proposals informed by “the historic nature of the building” and also gave preference to proposals that reflect community needs and goals. After a nearly four-decades struggle, the city chose GREC’s proposal. The communities that have fought over the use of the Greenpoint Hospital see the new transformation plan as the hard-won fruits of their labor. This past September, the City’s commissioner of housing preservation and development lauded the move as the chance to transform the site’s “long and storied history.”

“The community really sees this as a huge victory,” said Lang. The project will feature approximately 512 units of affordable housing and a new building which will serve as a homeless center for 200. Lang also emphasizes the integrated nature of their project, which will do away with all fences, empty parking lots, and abandoned buildings.  

“Instead of a big fence that goes around the whole place, we can now have a pedestrian way that will cut across the whole site,” he said. “It will be well lit, a lot safer. And we can use this as an opportunity to bring a health clinic to the site, and a small commercial cafe. It is a way to integrate the space and engage it with the community.”

The project is set for completion in 2023. In the meantime, members of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg communities eagerly await the opening of the complex, just as the community awaited the inauguration of Greenpoint Hospital over a century ago. The air in Cooper Park is celebratory. “The final result has been informed, and is the response to, the 36 years of community advocacy on the site,” said Lang. “In the end, it is going to be controlled by St. Nick’s, and finally for the community’s benefit.”

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

From Fire and Water Engineering, 1907.

The Essex is the tall, glassy residential and commercial building that looms over Broome Street between Essex and Norfolk. It is more a promise of the neighborhood’s future than a relic of its past, all visual traces of which disappeared when the block was razed in 1967. The new 26-story building fills in the blank of what in recent years was a vast and vacant parking lot that gave no indication of a block was once dominated by New Irving Hall, an active site of civic life in the Lower East Side.

On July 24, 1899, thousands of newsboys gathered at New Irving Hall at 214 – 220 Broome Street, only days into what became a two-week strike against New York’s rival afternoon newspapers, the New York Evening World published by Joseph Pulitzer and the New York Evening Journal published by William Randolph Hearst.

The strike came at a time when both publications were selling papers by innovating a new style of writing called yellow journalism. The sensationalist rhetoric and trumped up stories of the genre caught readers’ attention and propelled the United States into the Spanish-American War. Nobody could give voice to those frenzied headlines better than the newsboys hawking the papers. Their cries of “Extra! Extra!” could be heard over the carriages, competing salespersons and passing conversations at the busy plazas and street corners where they sold their goods.

Before the war, Hearst and Pulitzer devised a plan to increase their profits by raising their wholesale price from 5 cents to 6 cents for every 10 papers sold, producing a surplus of 10 cents for every 100-paper bundle the newsboys bought. In war time, the circulations of the two papers swelled and the price hike went undisputed. But in the summer of 1899, sales decreased and the newsboys, many of whom were orphaned children or came from poor families, felt the brunt of the losses. On July 19, 1899 the “newsies,” which included women and girls among their rank, decided to strike.

On July 22, 1899, Don C. Seitz, business manager of the New York World, wrote a memo to Pulitzer, now in the rare books and manuscript library of Columbia University. It began: “The newsboy’s strike has grown to an extensive and menacing affair.” Two days later, as the rally of newsboys gathered at New Irving Hall, packing the building’s entryways and window sills, Seitz sent a telegram to Pulitzer noting that the situation was “serious but improving,” although the paper had incurred $80,000 worth of circulation losses.

Kid Blink, a popular one-eyed newsboy and de facto leader of the strike, delivered the most memorable speech at the New Irving Hall meeting, in which he stoked the newsies’ resentments about the rise in paper wholesale prices.

“Ten cents in the dollar is as much to us as it is to Mr. Hearst, the millionaire. Am I right boys?” he asked his fellow strikers. “We can do more with ten cents than he can with 25. Is it boys?”  

Along with the higher cost of papers, the newsboys denounced the scabs hired to sell the papers in their place and the publishers’ refusal to compensate the newsboys for papers they did not sell. After two weeks of protest, the publishers and newsboys came to a compromise agreement. The cost of the papers stayed the same but the newsboys won the right to receive refunds for unsold papers.

By the strike’s end, the boys had demonstrated their indispensability to the publishers who depended on them for circulation, and New Irving Hall reinforced its reputation as a one of the city’s cultural and political hubs.

New Irving Hall at Broome Street began to appear in newspaper stories and advertisements in the early 1890s. On Sept. 23 1893, anarchists held a musical concert to raise funds for Emma Goldman, who was going on trial for what some reports called an “incendiary” speech she gave at an Aug. 21 rally encouraging workers to take bread if they are hungry. “Financially the concert was not a success, for one reason because Anarchists do not part easily with money,” reads a report in the New York Times. The following month Goldman was found guilty of aiding and abetting an unlawful assemblage for her speech. At Christmas of that same year, the hall was used to distribute gifts to children of poor families organized by the publication The Evening World.

New Irving Hall became popular at a time when there were “thirty different halls between Houston and Grand streets, east of the Bowery – i.e., one every two and a half blocks,” writes Mario Matti in his book Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side. New Irving Hall set itself apart as a meeting place for the surrounding Russian and Jewish immigrant communities. (At the time of the 1890 census, New York County had 1.5 million residents, 42 percent of whom were born in other countries.) Sabbath school anniversaries, weddings, and cultural events were held in the building. On July 12, 1895, it was there Hebrew citizens gathered to protest against the Board of Education, which “did not appoint a Hebrew as a school trustee for the Tenth Ward,” according to a report in the New York Times, even though “nearly 95 per cent of the children attending the schools in that ward are Hebrews.”

The venue was a dance hall that gained a reputation for its criminal and prostitute clientele. In the hall’s employ was the notorious New York gangster Monk Eastman, who worked as a bouncer and kept order with “the huge bludgeon he carried, the blackjack in his pocket, and the brass knuckles on both hands,” writes Neil Hanson in his book Monk Eastman: The Gangster Who Became a War Hero.

Unions and laborers, leftists and radical groups used the hall as a place for strategizing and organizing on their behalf. In 1894, cloakmakers met there to organize a strike of 12,000 garment workers to demand higher wages and a nine-hour work day. In 1901, thousands of Russian nihilist sympathizers met at the hall to denounce Russia’s government as “the most tyrannical in existence.” On May 4, 1902, there was a rally held at the hall for the German anarchist leader Johann “John” Most. Most was celebrating his last night of freedom before turning himself in on a conviction for an article in his paper Freiheit (Freedom) that “advised revolution and murder,” writes author Milton Cantor in his book The First Amendment Under Fire.

A year prior, In the case People v. John Most, Most was found guilty of misdemeanor and sentenced to one year in penitentiary for his writing. Most appealed the decision. In 1902, New York state passed the Criminal Anarchy Law, which made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government and set the precedent for state laws criminalizing political advocacy across the nation. Under this new law, the court of appeals upheld the original decision. The meeting at New Irving Hall took place before his sentence began, and thousands of people showed up in support of Most for what they called a farewell ceremony. At the rally, Most was arrested along with William MacQueen, editor of the paper Liberty. Riling the excitement of the audience, police reported that MacQueen made a speech in which he said, “To hell with the laws of America; to hell with the government. I am an anarchist.”

A few days later, on May 15, 1902, the hall was the site of a rally to support a kosher meat boycott. Women who frequented area butcheries had grown irate at the rise in prices in meat and a long day of tensions gave way to mob law. Protestors wrecked butcheries and set piles of meat afire in the streets of the Lower East Side.

New Irving Hall was just as popular with campaigning local politicians. In 1901, William Travers Jerome spoke at New Irving Hall in his successful run for district attorney. He served in the position for seven years from 1902-1909. In 1903, the hall was one of the first campaign stops for Mayor Seth Low as he ran for a failed second term in office against Democrat George B. McClellan Jr., who became the city’s 93rd mayor. In these years at the start of the 20th century, the hall was a place of unbridled agitation and impassioned political and labor discourse. In a few short years, the building’s fiery ending mirrored its trailblazing role in a bygone era of New York City.

In Moses Richin’s book The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870-1914, New Irving Hall is “the largest, most convenient, and most beautiful place on the Lower East Side” described as a “true temple of Eden.” That depiction of the hall is a far cry from the building’s description in a 1907 publication of  Fire and Water Engineering, a periodical on fire protection, water supply and sanitation in the city. In the publication, a fire report described New Irving Hall as “simply a fire trap” when the “old and combustible” building went up in flames on Feb. 25, 1907.

The fire started in the early the morning after a wedding ceremony and reception. The guests had long returned home, but news reports estimated that up to 5,000 residents were displaced from the tenement homes located at the rear and sides of the hall. The snow and rain from the day before left the roads icy, making it difficult for firemen and their horses to access the building, allowing the fire to do more damage. Miraculously, no casualties were reported, but there was no conclusion as to the cause of the fire.

For several weeks after the fire, congregants of local synagogues would sweep the ashes of the building’s ruins looking for pieces of sacred scrolls, which they had been allowed to store in the building. The remains of the recovered charred scrolls were delicately wrapped in a white cloth and stored for a ritual burial.

Three months after the fire, Zirchru Toras Moses Synagogue held funeral and burial ceremonies for the holy scrolls. Mourners could pay $1 to place one of the remains in a coffin, and once all the remains were placed in the coffin, there was a funeral procession from the synagogue, at 183 East Broadway, across Williamsburg Bridge all to Washington Cemetery. It is said to be the first time the observation of genizah, the secret hiding place for damaged or unused documents, was performed in the U.S.

In 2012, the story of the newsboys’ strike and their meeting at New Irving Hall was brought back into popular attention with the Disney musical Newsies, but otherwise there is nothing that remains of the building. After the fire, there is no mention of New Irving Hall in newspaper headlines. The lot continues to be comprised in part by tenement housing and small businesses, but it is no longer a site for political organization.

(Photo: Aleesa Mann)

In the late 1950s, the city designated the block as part of a slum clearance project that would displace almost 2,000 families. Since then, the site has been a source of contention and debate over its use and the need for affordable housing. Public documents detail potential uses for the area between the city and the local community. In 2013, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for a mixed-use development called Essex Crossing. The project spans 1.65 million square feet and includes over 1,000 housing units, a three-block market for food and small business retailers, a movie theater and major retailers Target and Trader Joe’s.

The Essex sits amid a construction site, surrounded by barriers and fencing, but project developers Delancey Street Associates plan to start moving tenants into the building this month. The larger project, expected to be completed in 2024, is one of a bustling community, not unlike the one that spanned the area in the not too distant past, before the parking lots and vacant space, when the area was dominated by businesses, housing tenements and New Irving Hall.

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

29 Avenue A, 1939-1941 New York City Department of Records.

Muller died in the basement of what is now 33 Avenue A between Second and Third Streets. Today, the plot houses Joyful Nail Salon flush with clients reclined on taupe leatherette pedicure chairs. A sign outside advertises color gel and manicures. Just above, public housig apartments have long since replaced the original 19th century tenement building. But to peel past that lacquered exterior is to reveal the plot’s history long since erased. A history of the East Village when it was German-speaking Kleindeutschland with tenement houses lining Avenue A; of a city in turmoil in the summer of 1857; of a riot in the 17th ward; of a clash between police and a largely immigrant community; of a man shot dead.

In life, Muller was described as a large man, barrel chested and broad. He had the frame of a blacksmith, the trade he’d find work in after his arrival in New York City on January 1, 1854 from Bremen Germany. The Times said that Muller worked at Mr. Sullivan’s blacksmith shop on Grand Street near Elizabeth and made 75 cents a day. Just two years after his arrival, Muller married Margaretta Wellenden in late August, 1856. Together, they moved to their tenement home on Avenue A and like most of their neighbors, lived among a vibrant community of their own German kin.

Map of New York City Wards and Police Precincts including the 17th ward, 1871 (Wikipedia Commons).

What was once the Mullers’ home stood in a municipal zone bounded by 14th Street on the north, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by Rivington, and on the west by the Bowery, spanning much of what is today the East Village and the Lower East Side. The neighborhood in Muller’s day was known as the 19th century’s third largest German-speaking urban area after Berlin and Vienna. The neighborhood flourished as a bustling center of ethnic immigrant life. At its center ran Avenue A, populated with goods and trade shops, churches, and more tenement houses.

On July 15, the New York Daily Times described the Germans of Avenue A in the 17th ward as  principally lower class. “The rag-pickers live in the neighborhood,” the Times sneered. “It is the German five Points. Most of what is tectonically dirty in a person and equivocal in morals, as far as this City is concerned may be found there.” The characterization sparked ire in the German community and the newspaper apologized in a correction in the next day’s edition. Avenue A, the newspaper said in its retraction, that what the paper had said about the German community was “wholly untrue.” “The rag pickers,” it went on, “whose lowly, but honest occupation is made the occasion of a fling in that paragraph do not reside in the seventeenth Ward: there is filth enough, of course, of where in the city is it clean? In a word, the citizens there are respectable and law-abiding.”

The New York Daily Times, July 13th, 1857.

But on July 12th of 1857, the residents of Avenue A were anything but temperate and law-abiding. Just a week earlier, riots embroiled lower Manhattan in the infamous Five Points neighborhood, just south of the 17th ward. Originally a small-scale turf war between a principally Irish criminal street gang called The Dead Rabbits and the nativist, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic criminal gang of volunteer firemen called the Bowery Boys, the fight quickly escalated into an all-out brawl between both gangs and the Metropolitan police. Battling tenement house fires, hurled bricks, and gangster barricades, the Metropolitan police finally managed to quell the rioters after two full days of violence. Yet even after order was restored to the streets, tempers still flashed hot between the newly appointed Metropolitan police force and the communities it served. On Sunday, another riot broke out on Avenue A and Fourth Street between police officers and local residents. Jedidiah Hartt, the local station captain, said that two police officers had tried to close the local bier saloons and break-up a street fight between two drunkards when a mob “suddenly burst forth as with the fury of a tornado, threatening to sweep all that opposed it.”

The following day, the Times reported that local residents sparked the riot after police, who had unlawfully arrested an innocent man, violently attacked the protesters. In the following days, newspapers across the city ran ablaze with stories of violence in the 17th ward. Brickbats flew, pistols were shot and Allan Hay’s Candle Factory was ransacked in the melee. Some 200 policemen marched down Third Street. An assembly of Germans threatened to storm the station house armed with knives and pistols. The Eight and 71st regiments were called out and held in readiness at the Military Hall at 163 Bowery. And finally, Muller, caught in the fray while walking home from church with his wife his neighbors insisted, was shot, beaten outside of his home, and carried bruised and bloodied into his own basement to die.

The city launched a full inquest into the killing. Yet despite the city’s best efforts, the neighborhood’s temper remained inflamed. The local German-language paper, Die Staatz, reported that Margaretta, Muller’s widow, was five months pregnant when in her grief she miscarried. The news percolated throughout the ward and lent further fuel to the German discontent. Margaretta had to be pulled screaming from the inquisition meeting hall upon hearing details of her husband’s death. Her neighbors grew ever more incensed and held a raucous meeting in a bier-hall to organize their resistance to police action. Even Muller’s funeral became a spectacle of civil resistance, the Times reported on July 15,  as the thousands of attendees, most of them German immigrants, marched from the Muller home up the Bowery to the 17th ward stationhouse, coffin in tow. At the station, they unfurled a giant white banner inscribed Opfer der Metropolitan Police. a Victim of the Metropolitan Police.

With tensions still taut, the city’s inquest brought a bitter dispute. The German community on one side sought to prove the riot was an act of police brutality and sought justice for what they saw as wanton violence and oppression from the newly established Metropolitan force. On the other, the Metropolitan police argued that not only were their officers blameless in Muller’s death, but that Muller himself might have been a ringleader in the violence.

Captain Hartt testified that he ordered his men not to use their pistols and that he saw a man he later recognized as Muller, “taking a very active part in the matter” and “throw[ing] a brick or stone with great violence towards the officers.” Edmund S. Lockwood, the ward’s police sergeant not only corroborated Hartt’s testimony but added that he believed that had there been any police violence, it was provoked and justified.

The New York Daily Times, July 18th, 1857.

Others claimed that Muller’s own kin shot him, that German rioters firing muskets from the rooftops had caused his death. Two 17th ward police officers, John Thomas and Robert Degrushe, both swore they saw shots fired from the second floor of a building on the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A. After they heard the shots, both witnesses reported seeing “a tall man with a stout chest,” believed to be Muller, crying out and falling into the throng of the crowd.

Coroners discredited the idea that Muller was shot from a window as the bullet had traveled in an upward direction from his chest to the base of his neck. Yet rumors persisted when the size of  Muller’s wound was compared with different bullet sizes. As The Saratogian reported on July 23, “it appears that the fatal bullet taken from Muller’s body was several sizes larger than could be used in the police pistols. The only reasonable solution is, that he was shot by a musket in the hands of some careless ‘Dead Rabbit.’”

The Germans countered the arguments with witness evidence of their own—each describing a very different scene of police brutality. Valentine Lutz, a resident of 52 Avenue A testified that the police attacked the crowd and “raised their clubs and cried out, ‘Clear the way,’ rushed on the crowd and beat them. The people ran away as fast as possible. Some of the horses were loosed and people had to take shelter wherever they could get it. Shots were fired, many came from the police; they fired high and low, and in all directions.”

Others swore they saw police shoot Muller. After watching police fire three rounds of shot into the crowd, another resident of Avenue A, August Goltz said, “I saw no stones thrown that day. I saw nothing thrown. I saw no resistance made to the officers.” When the coroner asked Goltz if he was sure the shot that killed Muller came from an officer, Goltz replied “Yes sir; the police were all together when Muller was shot.”

The inquest pressed on until the coroner begged the jury for a decision. All the while, witnesses from lieutenants, officers, and officials alike testified about German drunkenness and Muller’s guilt. The Germans countered, testifying about shootings and beatings; police chasing a family until the husband fell under policemen’s bats, an older gentleman clobbered by officers as he crossed the street, and more about Muller, bleeding from his gunshot wound, bludgeoned on the sidewalk outside of his home at 29 Avenue A.

At the close of the trial, neither party gave any ground. As The New York Tribune lamented on July 22, “One thing is evident, and that is, that there has been wholesale perjury somewhere. No doubt the Germans have been mistaken in some things, from their imperfect knowledge of the language; but their sight and hearing, of course, could not be so affected.”

Map showing original location of the tenement house at 29 Avenue A (NYPL Digital Collections, 1855.)

In the end, jurors reached no consensus in the inquest. John Muller was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery, several rioters were charged and sentenced, and the police were largely exonerated.  Yet the distrust sewn in the ward wasn’t so easily resolved. Newspapers the city over described scenes of lingering discontent: small bonfires lit along Avenue A and local boys throwing stones at police officers. A general unsettled quiet blanketed the neighborhood. As for the residents of 29 Avenue A, Margaretta could no longer stand to live in her apartment and moved a few blocks north to stay with her sister. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that over the course of the summer, the neighborhood raised nearly $500 for Margaretta.

Otherwise life along Avenue A eventually returned to normal as the German-immigrant community continued to thrive and enliven the streets of the East Village and the Lower East Side for most of the rest of the 19th century. Yet the relationship between the ward and its police force remained tenuous at best. Riots and accusations of police aggression punctuated life in the ward over the following decades. On January 13, 1874, some 1,200 members of the neighborhood’s German workingmen’s association were among some 7,000 unemployed demonstrators in Tompkins Square Park who demanded lower food prices and an end to rent-gouging. Samuel Gompers, the founding father of the modern American labor movement, described his experience in the ensuing clash with police as “an orgy of brutality” as “mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination.” At the time, it was the largest riot ever in New York City.

The city, however, did not address ward’s housing concerns for nearly another 60 years. 29 Avenue A was among 24 squalid tenement buildings along Third Street and a section of the avenue slated for demolition. In their stead, the New York City Housing Authority built what could be considered the nation’s first experiment in public housing. 122 apartments with modern conveniences, safe living conditions, and affordable rents. The tenement house once home to John Muller and countless other tenants was thus demolished to become one of the First Houses, a model of public housing in New York City.

And today, in the same plot where John Muller’s body law slain in the basement, the Joyful Nail Salon now advertises a pedicure deal on the front window. Music warbles from the radio, a Christmas ballad or a soppy love tune, and women sit perched with their hands splayed on rubber mats as their nails are shaped, filed, and shined. A century and a half since, the building on Avenue A is settled and quiet. Nothing now hints at the plot’s once violent moment. Nothing, except perhaps a woman getting her nails painted in the forefront of the salon. The paint she’s chosen is called birthday cake. The color, a shellacked brown-red like long dried blood.

Image: Logan T. Sibrel, ‘Best-Case’, 2018, Pencil on paper, 6.75 x 5.25 in. Courtesy the artist. (image via Leslie-Lohman Museum / Facebook)

Better Loser
Opening Friday, January 4 at Leslie-Lohman Project Space, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through January 6.

It’s the new year, and most of us are probably reflecting on what we did over the last 365 days and what we can do to at least be marginally better. Rather than dream up a more perfect being, artist Logan T. Sibrel prefers to focus more on the flaws and complications of being alive, making drawings depicting people who are acting difficult, awkward, aroused, and sometimes all three at once. Deemed “a serious joke,” his mixture of words and images are reminiscent of a sort of existential comic book. Perhaps they’ll inspire you to finally think of a resolution, or maybe just to ditch the concept entirely.

Emily Reilly / Dramaturg / December 2016 (image via The Invisible Dog / Facebook)

Faces of Downtown Scene
Opening Friday, January 4 at The Invisible Dog, 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm. On view through February 16.

There are a lot of artists and performers working (sometimes even for pay!) in New York nowadays, just as there have been for many years, even if now there’s more Targets and Chase banks peppering the scenery. Photographer Maria Baranova has photographed many of these people over the years, particularly those involved with the experimental performance, theater, and dance worlds. She took studio portraits of over 200 artists—not just performers but directors, designers, dramaturgs, and more—that will be on view at The Invisible Dog starting Friday. Accompanying the exhibition opening will be a performance duet by Dan Safer and Ae Andreas, starting at 6:30 pm.

(image via Studio 10 / Facebook)

Rough Edges
Opening Friday, January 4 at Studio 10, 7 pm to 9 pm. On view through February 3.

Some sculptures have clean, pristine lines, looking so perfectly-formed that it’s confusing to contemplate that an actual human being shaped it into existence. Others have rough edges, which yes, is what this solo show by Elise Siegel is called. Her assortment of busts (none are of any specific people, but rather “familiar emotional states” manifested in a somewhat-human form) prefer to take shapes that could be described as jagged, coarse, and textured rather than smooth as can be. You’ll still probably wondering how such an intricate and intriguing creation sprang into existence, though.

Our Elements
Opening Saturday, January 5 at 136 Avenue C, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through January 12.

A slew of artists, genres, and topics converge in the second-ever Our Elements, an exhibition of queer and feminists artists who use their work to delve into the topic of existing, whether as a group or as an individual, in a society that is “wreaking havoc on intersectional bodies.” Many pieces of art have already been made on this general topic, but it’s unfortunately one that has yet to stop being relevant, so there will always be fresh horrors to derive inspiration from. Participating artists include DJ Tikka Masala, choreographer and visual artist Naomi Elena Ramirez, and Courtney Alexander, an artist who designed a tarot deck featuring imagery from the Black Diaspora.

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

Death! Destruction! Dutchmen! The history of one intersection in the East Village features murders, kidnappings, and a few famous names. Now the Spotted Owl Tavern occupies ground level at the northwest corner of Avenue A and 13th Street, the latest in a long line of bars at that location. There’s been a watering hole in that space (well, a saloon or maybe a bierpalast or a nightclub) for over 125 years, exempting, legally speaking, the unfortunate period between the 18th and 21st amendments.

At eye level outside, an oval window protected by some intricate cast iron sparked my curiosity about the building’s past. The window floats alone in the middle of eight feet of a flat grey wall, with no relation to any symmetry or balance of the architecture. Inside, its ledge holds dusty curios and holiday decorations.

But before we get to the gang stabbings or the quacks or the Socialists, we need some context.

The Lenape people had been in the area for about three thousand years. Then the Dutch came and essentially, um, encouraged them out — at least those who hadn’t yet died of disease or starvation. Then the British invaded. Huzzah!

Pieter/Petrus/Peter Stuyvesant was the last Dutch director-general of New Netherland before he surrendered the land to the English in 1664. To ensure a peaceful transition, the Brits gave Stuyvesant a massive and swampy tract of land: between 23rd and 6th streets and 4th Ave and the East River. Stuyvesant happily retired on his bouwerij –– the Dutch word for farm — dotted with rolling hills, natural ponds, and plenty of room to breathe. It might as well have been Mars to the inhabitants of the East Village today. But that’s how it lasted for a while.

1769. Courtesy leventhalmap.org.

Don’t believe me? Check out the 1769 Ratzer map below or the New York Times article about it.

Seeing the rapid growth stemming from the town of Manhattan, the Stuyvesant family decided to develop their land. Naturally, they would cultivate around the paths already used throughout their sprawling property. You can see the beginnings of that plan above. In 1811, however, the NYC Commissioner in 1811 had different ideas.

Jerk.

For the two years before the bold plan for the development of Manhattan, John Randel Jr. and his merry band of surveyors traipsed around the island looking for hills to raze and ponds to fill. He was 20 at the time and guided by an unfortunate belief in “spiritual transformation through mathematics” and “egalitarianism through uniform geometry,” as Marguerite Holloway writes in her biography of Randel. An only slightly modified version of Randel’s plan erased whatever orchards and farm layouts the Stuyvesants had at the time. The sole arboreal survivor was a pear tree that became famous in its own right, as the “oldest living thing in New York.” It lasted on the corner at 13th and 3rd Avenue until a cart crashed into it and killed it in 1867, at age Really Old. No word on the fate of the horse.

Below, you can see the difference between the Stuyvesant’s plans and that of Randel.

1836. Courtesy NYPL.

Our building would have been at the intersection of Nicholas William and Cornelia Streets instead of its bland current address of 211 Avenue A. But the family didn’t lose all the fights. In this interactive map, you can see how the orginal commissioner’s plan called for the demolition of all of Stuyvesant Street. (That was the rear of our block.) The street survived, but only as a three-block fragment of its former glory. And then that once bustling thoroughfare became the dividing line between the inherited estates of Peter Gerard Stuyvesant and Nicholas W. Stuyvesant, the sons of yet another Stuyvesant.

Ole Nick lived in the middle of his estate in his family’s mansion that was built before the Revolutionary War. Such old world stateliness was no foe for Randel’s kind of gridded, reckless progress, however. In 1829, Nicholas Stuyvesant ceded that portion of his estate to the Street Committee of New York. The mansion was soon demolished.

(Courtesy NYPL)

It must have been a stressful time as Nick died a few short years later in 1833. His widow, Catherine Livingston Reade, and all of her children decided to divide the estate and sell chunks over time. The children were Peter, Nicholas William Jr., John Reade, Gerard, Robert Reade, Joseph Reade, Catharine Ann, Helen, and Margaret Livingston Stuyvesant. Our building belonged to his son Peter, not his father Peter. It’s confusing.

One of the last familial owners of Block 441, Lots 35-38 was the future 16th governor of New York Hamilton Fish, Nicholas William Stuyvesant’s nephew. Hamilton’s father, also Nicholas, was a revolutionary war hero and friend of Alexander Hamilton. Named after him? No idea. Check out this family tree for help mapping it out.

Nicholas Fish and Elizabeth Stuyvesant’s granddaughter, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, married into the Vanderbilt family and eventually spawned Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt. That eccentric heiress moved to Paris in 1936, dyed her hair pink, and changed her name to Nilcha. But that’s a story for another time.

Because now we get to focus on the flurry of characters who lived in our building and possibly looked through our window. In the mid 19th-century, the sheer number of German immigrants earned the neighborhood the name Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany.” By 1855, this area of Manhattan was the third largest “German” city in the world.  

The Atlantic Garden beer hall, via NYPL.

In the 1880 Census for our plot, however, you can see an influx of Irish as well. Let’s meet a few of the tenants. William Busch, birthplace Bavaria, claimed his profession as “Lager Beer Saloon.” (Couldn’t find the connection to Adolphus Busch, the German immigrant beer magnate in St. Louis, other than German-ness and lager beer.) One apartment over, Flanagan Martin, birthplace Ireland, listed his profession as “Huckster.” On second thought it might have been his wife Fanny who spoke with the census worker. Either way, I hope all three got past the language barrier to share a few laughs over a pint.

The best part is, grabbing a beer would have been very easy to do. Remember, 211 Avenue A seems to have always had a drinking establishment on the ground floor. (Now it’s actually two bars, The Spotted Owl Tavern and Laundry Service.) That may be what drew, in 1896, the Monroe Eckstein Brewing Company to expand from its main operation. Or maybe they just wanted out of Staten Island.

Definitely not going to find that kind of space in Manhattan.

Either way, that was likely the grog that gang leader Tony Souvehan drank when he went to the 1890s iteration of the bar. The papers just call it Sol Wijucker’s saloon. We know this because, well, gang members hung out there and shot each other.

A bit north of the territory Tony Souvegan’s Blue Row gang had claimed, a separate Rag Gang held the area between 31st and 42nd streets. A frightened 1890 edition of The Press tells how the Rag Gang were “particularly active in robbing people who pass through the streets, in house burglaries, in piracy, and in knocking out policemen.” Cops usually stayed away, but foolishly brave cops got beaten or shot.

In 1898 Joseph Mahoney, alias “Red Manny,” was the Rag Gang leader. He made the short walk from his home to the saloon 211 Avenue A. Then, with what must have been a Al-Capone-meets-John-Wayne snarl, he ordered “the best drink in the house, see!” Immediately he was recognized. Souvehan and other members of the Blue Row gang “asked Mahoney to treat them, but he declined,” the New York World reported.

If Red Manny thought demanding a free round was bad manners, he likely felt similarly about the various stab wounds he left with. But he survived to return the very next night. Along the way he bumped into Officer Michael Haggerty and asked the policeman for company, as “there might be trouble.”

And, even though this time Mahoney did buy a round for everyone in the bar, a fight broke out anyway. After getting smashed over the head with a bottle, Mahoney drew his pistol and shot Souvehan’s friend, Robert Crowley, in the gut. Officer Haggerty, realizing that there had indeed been trouble, chased Mahoney down the street. In the struggle Haggerty got shot in the hand but managed to detain Mahoney until help arrived.

When he found Crowley survived, Mahoney told reporters “I’m sorry he ain’t dead! The trouble with that gun is that it’s only a thirty-two. If it had been a thirty-eight it would have been different.” In the following investigation, the saloonkeeper denied there had been any kind of fight.

A few years later, in 1902, New York City tried to clean things up. The Health Department fined Charles Seidenberg, resident of our building, $50 for selling adulterated milk. That’s about $1,500 dollars in today’s value for adding plaster of paris and powdered chalk to get a more than natural mileage out of a gallon of udder juice. This wasn’t long after the swill milk scandal that killed nearly 8,000 infants in the city. Apparently cows fed with residual mash from nearby distilleries and kept in squalid conditions produce milk of less than appealing quality.

The New York Times described swill milk as a “bluish, white compound of true milk, pus and dirty water, which, on standing, deposits a yellowish, brown sediment that is manufactured in the stables attached to large distilleries by running the refuse distillery slops through the udders of dying cows and over the unwashed hands of milkers . . . ” Charles definitely should have known better.

Frank Leslie’s damning illustration, depicting the view of the 16th Street cow stable yard – via AtlasObscura)

Twelve years later, a different Charles — tenant Charles Gone — got sent to the infamous penitentiary on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. The armed 17-year-old robbed a bar only two blocks away from home. That briefly held payload of $33 landed him four years and eight months behind bars and cost him a $1,000 fine. What he couldn’t pay he had to make up in time served, one day for each dollar. The maximum sentencing was handed down by Judge Otto Rosalsky, a prominent member of the rapidly growing Jewish community.

Judge Otto Rosalsky and his wife.

Just after that, Mrs. Maria Tanebianco, the 73-year-old wife of a chandelier maker, was beaten senseless in her apartment and robbed of $1,000 in jewels, worth about $252,899 in today’s money. It was the third of a similar string of robberies in what was becoming a rough neighborhood.

It’s a good thing that the Socialists arrived in full force in 1918 to clean things up. The building served as one of three headquarters for the Socialist party of the 14th Congressional District. To “enliven” the spaces, New Yorker cartoonist Art Young donated a few of his pieces. The very biased New York Call brandished the “steaming, bubbling, active, thoroughly alive” socialism of the district. In 1918, the newspaper, lauding the district’s female canvassers, could truthfully call women citizens “voters” because New York State had amended its constitution to give women the franchise as of Jan. 1 of that year.

The Socialist candidate for Congress Scott Nearing lost to Republican Fiorello LaGuardia in that race. Nearing wrote an essay in which he was critical of American participation in World War I and was subsequently arrested under the Espionage Act. The rest of his life is pretty amazing, but unfortunately that all happened elsewhere.

This Art Young drawing criticizes the Espionage Act.

Over the next few years, our building’s tenants continued down their unfortunate paths. You can blame the fractions within the Socialist Party, but obviously people stressed about Prohibition in 1920. On that note: say goodbye to our friends at the Monroe Eckstein Brewing company.

During this time doctors were allowed to “prescribe” alcohol. Naturally, that created a boom in quacks. In 1923 Ottorius Menmoli, of 211 Avenue A, was arrested for practicing medicine without a licence. The New York Tribune described how Menmoli offered three different diagnoses for Ida Heidelberger and was brazen enough to accept payment each time. “On one occasion Menmoli tapped the lung of his patient to draw water, but drew blood.” That “oopsie” led to poor Ida’s death at only 20 years old.

But you didn’t need a doctor to find an escape. On June 2, 1925 a patrolman found a hat and coat in the center of the Manhattan Bridge just after midnight. Inside the pocket, a note signed Bernard Piasecki, 211 Avenue A:

To my wife: “I am leaving the world on a long delayed trip forever, but some day we will meet again. I was a failure in the world and I am leaving it as I had nothing to love but you, my son and mother. God bless you dear and the same to my son and mother, and all I have loved. I remain your loving husband” — BERNARD PIASECKI.

Turns out his mother never accepted his new bride. After he got laid off, the stress was just too much.

Just before Prohibiton’s end in December 1933, a reporter followed city officials as they walked the neighborhood to forcefully evict what were known as Home Relief Bureau Cases. That was an aid system set up after the Great Depression. Unfortunately, it wasn’t perfectly regulated and led to discretionary evictions. The Daily Worker detailed counted seven evictions, one of which was 211 Avenue A. The two children in the house were “chased into the street” before the furniture was removed and the house padlocked. The reporter called each case “a tale of extreme need and suffering.”

This was five months after a famous eviction of artists at Paradise Alley, only two blocks away. Those evictions led to riots.

Police reserves were called out to battle 500 jobless men. (Via tenant.net)

But three cheers for more beers. Turns out the return of booze relaxed things a bit, at least from the lack of violent headlines related to the building. That changed in 1974 at one of those wonderfully seedy East Village bars your parents warned you about, the Mongoose Club. Manager William Harvey was arrested for his role in a kidnapping ring. In William’s defense, he admitting kidnapping “dope pushers and underworld characters.” I wonder if his victim “Fat” Steven Monsanto would agree with the characterization.

After a few more iterations (Mongoose Club couldn’t cut it without William, it seems), the bar became the Boysroom until 2007. Though it wasn’t a strip bar, it got fairly frisky. One particularly amusing Yelp review: “if you think shaking your package in my face or on top of my drink is going to get you a tip, think again.” It was a pretty raucous space in the gay party scene. Current bar lore whispers that the owners changed the exterior wall to make way for a “secret” side door. I imagine to do so they had to move an old window. There it is!

More recently, in 2013, the building sold to the Kushner Corporation at 666 Fifth Avenue, as part of a $128 million, 17-building deal.

Regardless, poor Jared can’t seem to manage the stress of NYC real estate and his multimillion dollar mortgages. He sold his flagship 666 Fifth Avenue and our lovely building has been wracked with complaints and violations recently.

Hopefully he manages to keep it standing for another 150 years. I can’t wait to hear the stories of the people looking through our window.

A scene from Chambre Noire, running January 10-13 at The Public Theater as part of The Public’s 15th Annual Under the Radar Festival. Photo Credit: Benoit Schupp

Under the Radar Festival
Now through January 13 at The Public Theater (some shows at offsite venues), various times: $30

Yesterday marked the start of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, which showcases new performance from around the globe and is now in its impressive 15th year. While most of the shows take place at The Public, some are staged elsewhere, from Chelsea’s SVA Theater to The Met. Festival loyalists may recognize some familiar names—Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s [50/50] old school animation, a monologue-based work about violence that’s hard to adequately describe, also appeared as part of UTR’s smaller fest-within-a-fest last year, but is chillingly compelling enough to warrant a repeat viewing. Other highlights include creative storytellers James + Jerome filling the halls of The Met with their music-laced tales, multimedia puppet-centric riffs on both Frankenstein (Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein) and Warhol shooter Valerie Solanas (Plexus Polaire’s Chambre Noir), an evening with darkly odd comedian Lorelei Ramirez, and more.

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (image via Abrons Arts Center / Facebook)

American Realness
January 4-13 at various venues, various times: various prices

Once housed more wholly within Abrons Arts Center, the American Realness dance-centric performance festival has expanded to 12 venues across multiple boroughs, which is good news if the Lower East Side isn’t easy for you to get to. This year, the festival brings along works like a new queer piece (with sure-to-be-eye-catching costumes by Reid Bartleme) by Jack Ferver, a revival of Juliana F. May’s Folk Incest (a meditation on “seemingly unpresentable content” which ran at Abrons earlier in 2018), nora chipaumire’s explorations of pop, Africa, and capitalism, and the return of the curious Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, this time with “a transformative ritual based on the obsessive recreation of a single unpopular shopping ‘haul’ video that was posted to YouTube on Labor Day 2013 and later deleted by its creator.”

(image via PROTOTYPE Festival / Facebook)

Prototype
January 5-13 at various venues, various times: $30+

Opera is often dismissed as an old art form, suitable for equally-old rich people who can afford and/or endure it. The Prototype festival stands out in a sea of theater festivals that unfold in the city every January as the only one to focus on new, innovative opera and music theater, reminding attendees that reviving old masters is far from the only way to go. This year there’s 12 shows showcasing the talents of 24 composers, including “bilingual cross-border opera” Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance, the Royal Opera’s version of Sarah Kane’s fragmented play about mental illness 4.48 Psychosis, and an interactive experience where audience members play extras in a feature film that changes nightly.

FRIDAY

(image courtesy of Sam Corbin)

Quitters
Friday, January 4 at C’mon Everybody, 8 pm: $8 advance, $10 doors

Already feeling reluctant to follow through with your New Year’s resolution? You’re not alone. Enter into a legacy of quitting at Sam Corbin and Ian Goldstein’s show where failure takes front and center in a way that’s meant to stir up camaraderie rather than frustration. After a lengthy run at Pete’s Candy Store, they’re setting up shop at Bed-Stuy’s C’mon Everybody, but despite continuing this show for so long, you can be sure they’ve quit something else along the way. Tonight features comedians Joe Rumrill, Fareeha Khan, Alex Song, and Taylor Ortega, and you’ll have a chance to get up there yourself and detail a moment you gave something up for the chance to win a free drink. So go ahead, cancel that candlelit yoga class you scheduled for tonight and come see some quitting.

New Year’s Eve was the day the music died for venues Hank’s Saloon in Boerum Hill, Continental Bar in the East Village, Cornelia Street Cafe I n the West Village and nightclubs Cielo in the meatpacking district and Output in Williamsburg.

Between them, almost every genre of sound was represented including punk, hardcore, country, jazz, classical, house, techno and lots of spoken word. Though Continental Bar hasn’t hosted live music in years, I still felt it there from when I hung out starting in the ’90s (the stage was taken out in 2006). Though it got tough reviews when it switched to focusing on shot specials, I’ll always remember it as the free-for all punk clubhouse that hosted Murphy’s Law Halloween for years.

Hank’s Saloon kept up that tradition in Brooklyn as it became one of the few hard-rock stages in the borough following the closures of Grand Victory, AcheronDon Pedro’s, and Bar Matchless. They also shuttered last Saturday ahead of the building’s demolition, but thankfully for music fans owner Julie Ipcar plans to re-open this month above Hill Country’s new food court nearby, with bigger capacity and new sound system.

Though it is a literary as well as musical landmark, words can almost not describe the loss of Cornelia Street Cafe after 40 years in the Village. When I spent time with owner Robin Hirsch for the Cafe’s 40th Anniversary last year, he summed up the words spoken there as “the Greenwich Village coffeehouse conversation” in a place he described as “America’s bohemia.” Hirsch’s friend and legendary jazz composer David Amram played the venue’s final New Year’s Eve concert ahead of its closure the next day. When Amram, along with his band, raised his glass at midnight he said, “This is not a farewell but a celebration of Cornelia Street Cafe In Exile’s birthday and to the next 41 years of its life.” He then struck up a song starting with that line and the spirit in his 88-year-old voice soothed the audience members as they measured what they would lose the next day without the cafe.

Cielo and Output both went out with bangs as the house and techno beats kept their uber-hip crowds dancing well into New Year’s Day. Cielo was launched 15 years ago by DJ Nicolas Matar, who then followed up with Output in 2012. It became NYC’s “absolute best” nightclub. I was able to photograph the staffs of both and after talking with them, many of whom had worked for the full tenures of the clubs, I discovered that they genuinely loved their jobs and how the work families formed there were their biggest losses next the venues themselves.

Taken in the context of the rest of the night’s major parties– including JunXion’s New Dawn at Brooklyn Bazaar and Bang On!’s Time & Space at Knockdown Center– these portraits show the loss of these venues in real time as the rest of the parties raged on around them. My 72-hour New Year’s journey can possibly be summed up from my 3am drive from Cornelia’s emotional concert in the Village to two house parties in South Brooklyn. Going from a room full of tearful seniors citizens in the classic New York bohemia to the beer-soaked youth in a culturally expanding outer-borough that’s not focused on the past gave me pause. As much as I wanted to blast my memories towards the new “cool” kids, I held back, hoping that these old acquaintances would come towards these young minds naturally, just as they did mine.

6pm at The Lot Radio pop-up, Times Square

DJ Eli Escobar (left) with staff during the final sets of its Times Square residency:

8:30pm at Output, Williamsburg

VIP door manager Rene Harriman (top, third from left) with his fellow staff before opening up for the venue’s final night:

First attendees on line to see John Digweed’s NYE show on Output’s final night:

9pm at Continental Bar, East Village

Patrons having their final shots before NYE:

9pm at Coco 66, Greenpoint

Bartenders Jodi and Nicky (first and second from right) as they served pre-gamers:

9:30pm in Greenpoint

Brooklyn Wildlife’s Chris Carr with Gamba Forests’s Melissa Hunter Gurney (middle row, third and fourth from right) during their New Years Eve showcase:

9:30pm at Cielo, Meatpacking District

Manager David Mitchell with his staff before their final Saturday shift ahead of their NYE closure:

10pm at Easy Lover, Williamsburg

Co-owner Aaron Koen (center) with his DJs as he started up his NYE karaoke party:

10:45pm at Con Artist Collective, Lower East Side

Artist Wizard Skull (bottom right) with his fellow partiers:

3am in Prospect Lefferts Gardens

Chris and Melissa Detres’ lingerie and pajama slumber party at their home:

4am at Hank’s Saloon, Boerum Hill

Owner Julie Ipcar (lower photo, center) with patrons during her bar’s final last call:

4am at Brooklyn Lodge, Kensington

Doormen Tevin and Taylor Baily beside the venue’s VIP room with organizers Alex Neuhausen and Robin French (back, second and fourth from left):

Attendees of the New Year’s Masquerade:

5am at Knockdown Center, Maspeth

Attendees of Bang On!’s Time+Space NYE pary .

6am at Brooklyn Bazaar, Greenpoint

Partiers at the conclusion of JunXion’s New Dawn NYE party:

At 6am, the Orijins crew closing out JunXion’s New Dawn NYE party:

At 6:30am, founder Myk Tummolo (right pic) alongside artist Michelle Joni (left pic) and his crew (center) as they boarded their bus:

6:45am in Bushwick

After-partiers Rhiannon Catalyst, Dave Gelles and Miller Pyke as they walked through the neighborhood:

8am in Williamsburg

(L to R) Aleks Craine, Mike Trotter and Penny Lane alongside their partiers at the conclusion of Eris Evolution’s, SOUP NYC and G House NYC’s Metropolis Ball in Williamsburg:

12pm at Cornelia Street Cafe, West Village

Owner Robin Hirsch (center) with jazz legend David Amram’s band and family toasting the eve of the restaurant’s closing day:

12:30pm at The Lot Radio, Greenpoint

Soul Clap’s Eli Goldstein and The Lot Radio’s Tara Wight (l and r) as they reopened the station’s Greenpoint home after its Times Square residency:

3:30pm at House of Yes, East Williamsburg

DJ Penny Lane (top pic, second left) finishing her second New Year’s set in Bubble and Bass’s Onyx Room alongside partiers including Emily Plaskett’s pooch Meatball (right pic, center).

The conclusion of Bubble and Bass’s Seize the Day 2019 party at House of Yes:

Kellogg’s Diner, November 2018.

The idea of a good life for Irene Siderakis was being able to stay at home with her four children. She got to live that dream until her husband, Christos, died suddenly in April, leaving her to run the 24-hour Williamsburg diner they owned together. Life has a way of throwing things at you, she told me one November afternoon, standing behind the counter. Clad in black, she wore no adornments, save a pair of pearl earrings, and teared up as she recounted Chris’ burial at the Antonopoulos funeral home in Astoria, where the line of mourners snaked around the block. Irene had no time to grieve. Someone needed to take the reins at Kellogg’s, one of the oldest and busiest diners in Brooklyn.

Five years earlier, in 2013, Irene and Chris bought the business from Anthony, Frank and Fotis Fiotodimitrakis, three brothers from Crete that ran it since the 1970s — and who still own the building today. Irene described the day they took possession as the happiest of her husband’s life after the birth of their sons. Chris had co-owned two diners in Queens before Kellogg’s, but this was his first chance to run a business without outside partners. A photo she pulled from her iPhone from the day they took over shows the couple and their four blue-eyed boys standing under the diner’s fluorescent lights, all smiling at the camera.

Kellogg’s was and is a coveted spot. The diner sits at the corner of Metropolitan and Union, two Brooklyn arteries that bring together hungry partygoers, construction workers, lifelong neighbors, hipsters and cops from a nearby station. The diner’s retro blue-and-metal facade in the shadow of a 12-story luxury condo has acquired legendary status in Williamsburg, a mirage from the past amid the neighborhood’s latter day swank. In 2015, a Vogue photographer chose it as a location for a portraits series. The final breakup scene in Girls, the HBO show that is most associated with the gentrification of Williamsburg, takes place in one of its booths.

Kellogg’s is also a remnant of the disappearing all-day, all-night Greek diner. When I first met Irene on a November afternoon, she and the employees spoke to each other in “Greeklish” — the amalgam of English and Greek that is trademark in diners across the country, especially among first generation Greek Americans. Joanna, the 54-year-old manager, who is also Greek, occasionally throws in some Spanish to address one of the Mexican waiters. “I can curse in every language,” she bragged.

The story of diners is a quintessential migrant story, and a testament to the arduous process of Greek integration to the United States. Between 1890 and 1924, nearly a half million Greeks arrived, fleeing poverty and political turmoil in their homeland. While many became cheap labor in mines and railroads, they soon put their kafeneío tradition to work: wherever they ended up, they started cooking meals and selling them to their co-workers. When a factory opened up or a mine was dug, there was a Greek wagon with cheap coffee and affordable food — the seed of the American diner.

Dan Georgakas, a professor at CUNY who researches labor and ethnicity, told me that by 1910 there were thousands of Greek-owned diners across the country. Greeks were not the only migrant group to follow such a pattern: the Chinese also established cheap joints in blue-collar areas. Georgakas explained that the Greeks—unlike the Chinese and other immigrant small time entrepreneurs—were more likely to adapt what they offered to local tastes. Their priority, Georgakas said, was to build a wide clientele. Not only that, he added, but it came naturally to them to do so. “The Greeks had a multicultural history that involved Sicily, Egypt, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the Black Sea,” Georgakas said. “So they had no problem adjusting their menus to other national tastes.”  That might explain why today’s diners are as fast to serve a quesadilla as they would a moussaka.

Job ads on the Omaha Daily Bee (1916) and the Washington Post (1919).

Greek-American success in the restaurant industry, however, did not stem the heavy discrimination they often experienced in the streets and at the institutional level. At first, Georgakas explained, some Southern states classified Greek immigrants as “Oriental,” not European, putting them in the radar of their racial segregation laws. The Ku Klux Klan —  which obtained its name from the Greek word for circle, kuklos — often targeted Greek neighborhoods, torching houses and harassing their inhabitants. It was common to see the phrase “No Greeks need apply” at the end of newspapers job ads.

“The only group that was considered worst were the Jews,” Georgakas said.

* * *

Greeks did not establish Kellogg’s, but the diner’s golden years began with the  Fiotodimitrakis brothers, who bought it in 1973. Like Irene’s father, they had come to the United States in the 1960s. When they bought it, Kellogg’s was merely a Quonset-like hut, less than a third of its current size. It had been closed for several months; its previous owner, Henry Benter, had shut it down after the New York Daily News included it among 42 New York eateries that had committed health code violations.

However poor was the condition the Fiotodimitrakis found the diner in, the neighborhood wasn’t much better. Williamsburg at the time was riddled with crime, racial tensions and gang violence. “There were a lot of drugs and a lot of prostitution,” Frank, the youngest of the brothers, told me. “It was scary to go to work.”

The brothers remodelled the restaurant several times, eventually acquiring the adjacent tobacco shop, which had belonged to a Sicilian migrant. The last big makeover happened in 2008, when Kellogg’s tripled its capacity and became the more upscale version of itself that exists today. As a neighbor told the New York Times, it went from being a legit “old-school, greasy-spoon” to “a picture of a greasy-spoon diner.”

But when the Fiotodimitrakis brothers reopened it in 1976, old-timers still recalled the days when Kellogg’s was a shack that served workers from nearby factories and a barn across the street. No one knew for sure when the diner first opened, and the official records get murky, but the oldest known photo of the diner dates from 1940, the year the Department of Taxes took a picture of every block in New York for real estate appraisal. Next to the hut is the now-gone cigar shop, which had been owned by an Italian immigrant named Nunzio de Feo, who had been dead for 13 years when the photo was taken.

Kellogg’s Diner and Nunzio de Feo’s shop in 1940. (NYC Department of Records.)

The de Feo shop, now a part of Kellogg’s, tells yet another story of successful Mediterranean assimilation in New York. The de Feos were a Southern Italian family who settled in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, when the need for cheap labor loosened American immigration laws and four million Italians came fleeing misery in Southern Italy and Sicily. Nunzio was a tobacco trader from Nola, a small village at the bottom of Mount Vesuvius. He and his wife Maria left Naples aboard the SS Palatia on May 1, 1904 and arrived to New York 16 days later. (Fun fact: a year after the de Feos completed their journey, the Russians bought the Palatia, which eventually became a flagship warship for the Soviet navy).

Nunzio’s passport application describes him as a short man with a “high forehead, chestnut eyes, Grecian nose, oval face, chestnut and grey hair, and a dark complexion.”  He became a citizen in June 1919, and three months later he purchased the Williamsburg establishment that he would turn into a tobacco shop. In 1924, when he was 57, he applied for a passport renewal to visit his homeland for a year-long trip.

That same year, President Coolidge would impose his migrant quota, which would prohibit millions of Southern Europeans from joining their families in the new land. The Italians who arrived before the restrictions, like the de Nunzios, also suffered their share of discrimination; they were often stereotyped as anarchists, troublemakers and terrorists, and just like their Greek counterparts they were often harassed and targeted by hate groups. In 1891, a mob lynched eleven Italians in New Orleans after they had been accused of killing a policeman. It remains the largest mass lynching in the history of the United States.

Passenger list of the SS Palatia, Naples – New York, 1904. Nunzio de Feo’s name is number 22.

Respected scholars such as Edward Alsworth Ross, a Stanford professor who is considered the founder of sociology in the United States, endorsed and legitimized the anti-immigrant sentiment. A classic eugenicist, Ross defended that migrants coming from rural and working-class Europe were genetically inferior to America-born whites. In his book The Old World in the New, he proposed a classification of the intellectual capability of newcomers based on their place of origin. Mediterranean migrants were among the lowest on the scale.

“Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skewed faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads,” Ross wrote in 1914, ten years after Nunzio and Maria descended from the SS Palatia. “Such people lack the power to take rational care of themselves.”

* * *

The image of the bearded hipster invading Brooklyn to shop at Whole Foods and squat cozy overpriced coffee shops has become the punchline for every New York gentrification joke. But long before the word gentrification came into use, the phenomenon was already the force behind the creation of Williamsburg in 1792. That year, a speculator named Richard M. Woodhull bought a patch of land around what is now the block where Kellogg’s stands. He laid out the terrain in city lots and began to sell them. Until then the area had been an amalgam of farms, many of which retained the names of the Dutch settlers who owned them since the 1600s.

Then as now, the changes did not please the earlier residents—the farmers who had cultivated the land for generations. Henry R. Stiles, a physician who studied the history of Brooklyn, described their shock upon realizing that life as they knew it was about to end. “Suddenly, upon the shores of the beautiful river, appeared the nucleus of a village; and, even while they rubbed their astonished eyes, it expanded to the fair proportions of a city,” Stiles wrote in 1854. “The surveyor’s chain ran ruthlessly through their cabbage gardens, with a reckless indifference to time-honored farm lines; and they found that the ancient homesteads, which had sheltered their infancy, and their maturer years, were standing directly in the route of newly plotted streets and avenues, with which the crafty speculator had surrounded them, as with a spider’s web.”

Woodhull named the township Williamsburgh in honor of his friend Colonel Jonathan Williams, who had surveyed the land—and who happened to be Benjamin Franklin’s grandnephew. Williamsburgh was incorporated as a village in 1827, and became part of Brooklyn in 1855, the same year the final ‘h’ was dropped from its name. By then the town had already become home to numerous German, Austrian and Irish immigrants, including many capitalists that established their businesses there and turned it into a fashionable resort.

The plot now occupied by Kellogg’s was probably empty in 1835, when its owner John Skillman sold it to a man named Samuel Benden for $200. During the second half of the 19th century, the block was one of the four corners of an Irish settlement known as “The Green.” Between 1861 and 1890, an Irishman named Thomas Gallagher ran a grocery store in what would become the de Nunzio house. The location however wasn’t very valuable: before the land was leveled in 1892, that stretch of Metropolitan Avenue was a low ground that often flooded. As the German-born historian Eugene Ambruster wrote in 1942, “passengers in the horse cars had to stand upon the seats while crossing this pond, the water often going almost to the horses’ neck.”

The area experienced a demographic shift at the turn of the 20th century. Thousands of migrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe, while many Jewish families switched the overpopulated Lower East Side for Williamsburg after the construction of the bridge in 1903. Among the newcomers were the de Nunzios, who would take a first step into turning the block into a Mediterranean haven.

* * *

Irene’s father, Vassilis, was sitting at the counter at Kellogg’s on a late November afternoon. He had arrived in New York in 1966, only a few months before the coup that would establish a military junta in Greece. The dictatorship made him forget the idea of returning to his hometown in Thessaloniki; soon after, he got caught up in the migrant hustle, working multiple jobs and eventually creating a family. Now that he’s retired, he comes to Kellogg’s every afternoon to help his daughter supervise the diner. “After what happened,” he said, pointing at Irene with a mild head movement, “I don’t even think of going back home.”

Vassilis drew a map of the Thessaloniki of his childhood on a white paper napkin. He recalled now-gone schools and kafeneíos, many of which belonged to Greeks that fled to the Americas — perhaps now the owners of diners along the East Coast. As her father looked at the past, Irene made herself busy with the day-to-day grind, which can get overwhelming but is always better than the void. “I’m probably the only woman who owns a diner in New York,” she said, her eyes wide open, as if puzzled by the randomness of life. “But I can do nothing except going forward.”

(Photo: Daniel Leinweber – Razberry Photography)

After a rainy installment last summer, Governors Ball is back with its 2019 lineup. Headlining the three-day food-and-music fest on Randall’s Island this year: Tyler, the Creator gets top billing on Friday, May 31; Florence + the Machine will close things out on Saturday; and the Strokes, who last played the Ball in 2016, will wrap up the whole shebang on Sunday.

Other standouts include Lil Wayne, Major Lazer, NAS, SZA, Blood Orange, Mitski, The Internet, Vince Staples, and Julian Casablancas’s other project, The Voidz. Will the Strokes frontman do another rendition of “Walk on the Wild Side”? Only one way to find out. (Also note the presence of Charlie XCX, who had a hand in two of the most ubiquitous party anthems of the past decade: “Boom Clap” and “I Love It.”)

Tickets are now on sale here, and are going for a special rate of $275 (plus fees), which will jump to the regular $305 at midnight.

Here’s a look at the whole lineup.

(@sloaneklevin on Instagram)

Since Governor Cuomo announced last week that the MTA would scrap its total L-train shutdown in favor of a new plan involving the closure of just one tunnel at a time on nights and weekends, the mood has been a little bit celebratory and little bit WTF. Among other things, New Yorkers who had been ready to see their commutes descend into stygian chaos are now wondering what will happen to all those promised ferries, buses, and bike lines. Some still want ’em, others most definitely don’t.

In a letter released today, City Council member Antonio Reynoso, who represents parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick, called the timing of Cuomo’s decision, just three months before repairs were set to begin, “an insult to the residents, elected officials, and MTA officials who have spent countless hours, resources, and taxpayer dollars on extensive planning to produce a comprehensive mitigation plan.” He said the governor had “not made any effort to reassure New Yorkers that this is the best course of action and not just a temporary solution.”

Reynoso said he would continue to push for shutdown mitigation steps that “still warrant implementation,” including “increased service on neighboring subway lines, improvement of area bus service, the installation of new bike and bus lanes along the L train corridor, and increased ferry service.”

As has been noted, some of those coping mechanisms have already been put into place, such as new entrances for the Bedford Avenue subway station, a two-way bike lane along Delancey Street, and new bike lanes on 12th and 13th Streets. Last month, Citi Bike announced that it would add five stations in Bushwick, a number deemed inadequate by some.

Still, it’s uncertain what will become of other planned stopgaps, such as increased service on the G, J, M, and E lines; an estimated 80 express buses per hour running from the Grand Street and Bedford Avenue L stops to Soho and the East Village; and a new ferry from Williamsburg to Stuyvesant Cove in Manhattan. In announcing its change of plans, the MTA said merely that it “still plans to implement additional subway service where needed, including on the G, M and 7 Trains.” It also said it would forge ahead with “station improvements, such as providing ADA accessibility and other capacity upgrades at the Bedford Avenue Station in Brooklyn and the 1st and 6th Avenue Stations in Manhattan.”

Not everyone wants to see certain “improvements” go forward. The 14th Street Coalition, a community group formed to oppose planned traffic-pattern changes in Manhattan, is calling on the MTA and DOT to abandon some of the changes they’ve already implemented. In a press release, the group, which sued the agencies last year, calls on them to “return the neighborhood to pre-project conditions,” which means ditching those new bike lanes on 13th and 12th Streets. Some are unhappy that the lanes replaced parking spots when they were installed in October.

In addition, the 14th Street Coalition wants the MTA to call off the conversion of 14th Street into a “busway.” The DOT had already started repainting the road in anticipation of the busway’s launch in April. It planned to take 14th Street from four lanes to three (one lane for bus stops and two for bus and delivery travel), ban cars from 5am to 10pm, expand sidewalks, and install bus boarders and commercial loading spots. The Coalition is calling on the DOT to keep four-lane traffic and cancel the pedestrian expansion along 14th Street.

The group is worried that even without the shutdown, the DOT will use 14th Street as  “a ‘testing ground’ for radical alternatives that have been pushed by various groups for years,” it said in a press release. “With the closure hopefully in the past, we will not allow our neighborhoods to be guinea pigs with extremely disruptive changes to our safety.”

Transportation advocates Max Sholl and Thomas DeVito, of Transportation Alternatives, are of a decidedly different mind:

Protected #BikeNYC lanes on Grand St have been demanded by various North Brooklyn community members for years; six people have been killed on Grand St since 2009.#LtrainShutdown or not, we need safe & equitable streets that serve the most vulnerable. @CMReynoso34 @JuliaCarmel__ https://t.co/spEWGO6o6P

— Maximillian (@MaxSholl) January 7, 2019

.@TransAlt‘s @PedestrianTom: “nyc is in the middle of a transportation crisis. the solutions to the crisis… are more bus lanes, more protected bike lanes… these mitigation efforts need to stay… not just in reponse to the L train, but more widely in the system.” pic.twitter.com/Wrr0bMkNJ3

— zainab iqbal (@planetzainab) January 7, 2019

As of now, not much is certain. After the MTA’s announcement last week, Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer said the agency had agreed to “answer a battery of questions from [her and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams] over the next two weeks, and to conduct four public hearings in Manhattan and Brooklyn on the new plan.”

This much is certain: Plans for an L-shutdown-themed board game, dubbed “Escape From HelL,” are going forward now that a Kickstarter has raised about $4,000 more than it set out for.  The board game’s creators write, “While the plans for the shutdown continue to change, rest assured supporters, it’s still going to be hell during the 15-20 month L-Train renovation project.” The game will now include playing cards such as “Cuomo changed his mind again and the shutdown starts two minutes ago. Move back 3 spaces.”

Joel Osteen (Jessie Pierrot) part 1, 2018
Single Channel Video
00:31:28

Holy Fools
Opening Wednesday, January 9 at Rubber Factory, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through February 3.

Clowns are perhaps one of the most polarizing figures on this green earth. Some people have a literal phobia of them, some find them distasteful, some chuckle at them, some employ them, some become them, and some make art about them. One of the art world’s more notable clown-based endeavors is Bruce Nauman’s 1987 piece Clown Torture, featuring a slew of video displays portraying “an absurd misadventure of a clown” that’s both morbid and humorous. Over three decades later, artist Ondine Viñao is putting her own spin on this work in an exhibition at Rubber Factory, recruiting four all-female clownish performers to stage their own mishaps, mixing both trauma and folly.

(image via Howl Happening)

Fugitive Moments
Opening Wednesday, January 9 at HOWL! Happening, 6 pm. On view through February 6.

For most people, Polaroids were just a way to capture a moment at a party, or a welcome alternative to proper film development for those who did not want to wait. Both the white border around a Polaroid and the film itself have always been sites of customization, but rarely is the act of instant film modification truly elevated into an art form. Artist Gail Thacker spent most of her time living and working in cheaper, grittier 1980s New York, when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to rear its destructive head. Thacker photographed friends, collaborators, and acquaintances, and after an accident involving unrinsed film, she began more intentionally creating images awash with beautiful flaws, many of which will be on view at East Village space Howl Happening.

work by Alasdair Duncan (image via Theodore:Art / Facebook)

ICYMI
Opening Friday, January 11 at Theodore:Art, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through February 10.

New York is a big city, and there’s always something to do. This is good for the most part, but can also be one big overwhelming dose of FOMO. The folks at Bogart Street gallery Theodore:Art know this, which is why they’ve organized a group exhibition showcasing five artists who have exhibited at their gallery over the past six years they’ve been operating in Bushwick: Bill Albertini, Eric Brown, Alasdair Duncan, Scooter LaForge, and Michelle Vaughan. So even though you’ve missed a lot over the years (who can see everything?), here’s your chance to catch up.

Mo Chieh/莫捷, Perfect Vegetables, 2018, Video, 15 mins. (image courtesy apexart)

Peer2Pickle
Opening Friday, January 11 at apexart, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through March 9. 

No matter how you grew up or what you ate in the process, one thing probably remained the same: you were reminded that wasting food is bad, and you probably ended up still wasting food in one way or another. Over the years, this problem has only increased, as it’s estimated 40% of all food is wasted, and a large percent of that ends up sitting in landfills, creating methane. A new exhibition curated by Justin Tyler Tate seeks to showcase multiple creative ways of reusing organic material, asking four artists to turn “disused organic matter” into something with a new life. Rather than just an exhibition to be looked at, the show is rife with interactivity, including workshops and sustainable dinners.

(Courtesy of Capital Ode)

Among dozens of CDs, birthday cards, and posters, a few hats hang on Capital Ode’s Far Rockaway bedroom wall. “Every single place that I’ve been in really contributed to who I am in some way,” says the rapper and DJ, pointing to a few hats that stand out to him. “There’s a Toronto [Maple Leafs] hat up there, there’s a Marlins hat up there – Florida Marlins, not the Miami Marlins.”

Only a true Miami fan or resident would make the distinction. Ode, born Odelle George-Perreira, only lived in Florida for a few years, but he hung the Marlins hat with as much honor as the others.

A constant change in scenery, and headwear, has always been part of his life. He was born in Toronto and spent his first 10 years in Canada until moving to Broward County, Florida in 2001, then Alabama, then New Jersey, and, now, New York. I couldn’t help but compare his situation to that of Vince Carter, whose mid-dunking face looked on from a poster. The NBA star spent his first six seasons on the Toronto Raptors, was then traded to the New Jersey Nets, and has since been on six different teams. Unlike Carter’s, Ode’s move wasn’t heavily publicized, probably because he wasn’t a former Rookie of the Year, but also because he came in illegally.

(Courtesy of)

As we’re talking, he sits comfortably in a tall black office chair in his bedroom studio where he records his music – inside was a professional-looking microphone, isolation shield, and impressively sized speakers. Growing up, Ode went to Bedford Academy, an above-average high school school in Brooklyn where the main focus was, according to him, sending students to Ivy League schools.

As a member of the golf team sporting a 1700 SAT score, Ode looked like a perfect candidate for college. But his citizenship was still in question, and according to Ode, the process isn’t easy. “I know it’s long, it’s expensive, and if you mess up that means you’re starting over from the beginning,” he says. “My mom had been filing for us since I was in the 8th grade and I didn’t get my green card until two years after I graduated high school.”

He leans back, arms folded, in a gray sweater and a classic navy blue New York Yankees hat possibly meant to let everyone know where he currently lives (although Far Rockaway, Queens is a ways from the Bronx), and starts talking about “Live Illegal.” In late spring of 2018, Ode released the song, in which he documents the adversity facing undocumented residents in the United States. Ode later ended the year by dropping his “Canadian Bakin’ Freestyle,” where he raps about American’s ignorance towards Canadians.

When he first came to country, Ode wasn’t afraid to tell his classmates he was from another country, but once he got older, he started to realize the consequences of being a foreigner. “When I lived in Alabama, there was this one girl who was half Mexican but born in California,” he recalled. “I remember she told me that when she first moved there somebody called immigration on her and she had people show up at her family’s home.” Nothing happened to her, though, because she was an American citizen. If Ode was in the same situation, he would’ve been sent back across the border.

As someone without much guidance on how to maneuver undocumented, Ode treaded carefully for his middle and high school years, mostly fending off any threat of deportation by telling people he was from New York, where he had family; he feared that any little slipup could cost him, so he kept his country of origin a secret from most. “My mom always instilled in my head that ‘your friends might get in trouble and whatever might happen to them, they’re going to be good, but if you get in trouble, you’re out of here,’” he says. “For us, we couldn’t tell everybody [that they were from Canada] because you never knew what somebody might try to do.”

Ode rifled through some folders on his Mac and started playing some tracks from his upcoming album. He usually masters his work at home but decided to mix this project at Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan (the studio where Tupac was shot, in case you were wondering) and have it mastered at Downtown Studios. You can tell – it sounds a lot more professional than his past work.

If you were to try and guess where Ode is from strictly off of his music, you’d have a hard time. He sometimes raps with a punchy flow reminiscent of an old-school New York rapper– but may adopt Florida vernacular. Or maybe he’ll slow himself down like a southern artist – but use New Jersey slang. In some of his earlier songs, he points out, he had a southern drawl that he couldn’t recreate today even if he tried. Think Nas if he got lost south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In his more recent songs, Ode has more actively represented his Canadian roots (“Nappy head, head honcho reppin’ Toronto”), but while he was living in the States illegally, he merely alluded to it. “For a while, until I got my green card, I was always hinting at it in raps,” he says. “There were a whole bunch of songs where I hinted at it going back home [Canada]. I was trying to do something while I pass the time.”

He’s now selling shirts to promote the song “Live Illegal”; a percentage of the proceeds go to United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led organization helping out those who are in similar situations to Ode. His life and identity have adjusted over the years, as has his music. “It’s a journal,” he says. “It helps me be able to document my life, in a way.”

(image via Exponential Festival / Facebook)

The Exponential Festival
Now through February 2 at various venues, various times: $20

The Exponential Festival is a little different from the many theater festivals setting up shop in venues across the city this month. It’s exclusively based in Brooklyn, the material it champions is a little weirder and genre-expansive than what you might typically think of as “theater,” and it runs longer, which means both more shows (a dizzying array, really) and more chances to see them. Some highlights include a new short play by Athena playwright Gracie Gardner, a double bill of comedy from Justin Linville and David Perez, a play based on the Talmud and Kung-Fu films, a dystopian psychosexual musical with a disco soundtrack, an intimate show involving one audience member and one performer, and A Doll’s House, Part 3.

THURSDAY

(image via Stigma Unbound / Facebook)

Stigma Unbound: Denial of Service
Thursday, January 10 at Secret Brooklyn Dungeon, 8 pm: $20 

Tonight, this showcase of performance by sex workers and allies followed by a consent-focused, gender-inclusive play party, returns to its secret dungeon location for another evening of shows and shenanigans. This time, the theme is “denial of service,” for all you brats out there, with performances by Theydy Bedbug, C’était BonTemps, Nepenthes, Bitch, Bailey Stone, Lethal Kit, and Mistress Ashley Paige. Then the party commences, with live modeling and drawing and surely, something a little steamier.

FRIDAY

(image via Brooklyn Comedy Collective / Facebook)

Edy and Brian’s Big Cup
Friday, January 11 at The Brick, 10:30 pm: $10

I’m not sure what exactly the big cup is that comedians Edy Modica and Brian Fiddyment have decided to center an entire show around, but you can assume that 1. it is big, and 2. it is a cup. What more do you want? They caution that you may be able to interact with it yourself, but it is very important you don’t knock it over. Now that we’ve established those ground rules, expect an hour of comedy, videos, and more, plus a reliable dose of absurd energy.

SATURDAY

Bowery Comedy
Saturday, January 12 at Bowery Electric, 6 pm: FREE

The Bowery Electric is normally a place for bands, but come Saturday night it will be filled with jokes aplenty at this stand-up show hosted by Maria Wojciechowski, Lauren Vino, and Bronwyn Ariel Isaac. The comics taking to the stage this time around include Rebecca O’Neal, Katie Boyle, Amamah Sardar, Justin Hill, and Ethan Simmons-Patterson. Plus, it’s free and early in the evening (6 pm), so you’ll have plenty of time to do whatever it is you do on a Saturday night after the show concludes. Is disco laughs the new disco nap?

(Photo: Melissa Hom for NY Mag)

New York City is getting less and less jingoistic where pizza is concerned. First we got St. Louis-style pizza in 2012 with Speedy Romeo, then “Wisconsin-style” that same year with Nicoletta, respectable Chicago-style with Emmett’s in 2014, and, of course, Detroit-style with Emmy Squared in 2016. If you thought the next carpetbagging crust would be Connecticut’s famed apizza (shoutout to Frank Pepe!), you were wrong. Instead we get… Rhode Island-style?

That’s how the grilled pies at Violet, a new East Village spot from the Emmy Squared folks, is being hyped on blogs like Gothamist, and indeed a press release says they’re “inspired by [owner Matt] Hyland’s nostalgia for Al Forno in Providence – where he often ate while attending school and where he and Emily had their first date.”

Cute. But not everyone agrees that the pies are Rhode Island-style.

Here’s Grub Street describing how they’re made:

The dough is low-hydration, naturally leavened with a sourdough starter, and oiled like focaccia, resulting in a crust that’s paper thin but not crackery, tender, and very light. It’s on the grill for under 30 seconds, Matt says, before it gets charred, taken to the toppings station, and put back on a cooler section of the grill.

The result is something that does indeed look similar to the pies at Al Forno, a Providence standby that ranks among Eater’s 38 Essential Pizzerias Across America. But as these Twitter users point out, the flatbread-type pies aren’t what many associate with “Rhode Island-style”:

I’m so mad about this. You can’t find good tomato pie strips anywhere in Pizza City, NY, and now people try to besmirch our good name trying to serve up floppy, oily flatbread with grill marks on it.https://t.co/IQYmVoW5Mr

— ian.pvd (@ian_pvd) January 10, 2019

Sorry to break it to you @Gothamist, but that is “Al Forno-Style” Pizza, which they do reference to on their site. This is “Rhode Island-Style” Pizza (aka Pizza Strips), which most non- Rhody folks think is disgusting -> https://t.co/Lx7r17nxXy https://t.co/rKrQYIx1ys

— Jon Bahr (@jonbahr) January 10, 2019

Courtesy of Edible Rhody, here’s a description of the more ubiquitous style of Rhode Island ‘za:

Pizza strips, otherwise known as party pizza, bakery pizza and, in some circles, tomato pie, are rectangular slices of focaccia-style bread topped with spicy tomato sauce. They have no cheese (unless you count an optional sprinkling of grated Romano) and are properly served at room temperature.

Pizza strips from Antonio’s Bakery in Warwick, Rhode Island. (Photo: David Iannotti via Wikimedia Commons)

If that sounds pretty unappetizing, photos like this (uh, Ellio’s without the cheese?) probably aren’t going to get your mouth watering. When this food critic wrote that her first encounter with the stuff was “lodged indelibly in my mind,” I had to double-check that she hadn’t written “lodged in-edibly.” But whatever, maybe this is one of those freak Rhode Island things that kind of grow on you, like coffee milk, or DJ Pauly D. (Yup, the Jersey Shore star is from Rhode Island, and tomato pies are big in Jersey, too.)

Whatever the case, despite our recently broadened horizons, not all New Yorkers are giving Violet’s $10-$22 pies the benefit of the doubt.

So, we’re willing to call anything “pizza” now? When Original Ray invented pizza in New York all those years ago, this is not what he had in mind!

— Jamal Alexis Downer (@jamaladowner) January 10, 2019

The recipient of the Best Award may still be up for debate, but we can at least agree that this ain’t it: https://t.co/3QmEi5DEUz

— Stefanie Arroyo (@stefanie_arroyo) January 10, 2019

What is this? Soggy flatbread? Rhode Island has some great pizza but “RI style” is not a thing that exists https://t.co/upsQlYRz1e

— brienc (⚡️):} (@brienyc) January 10, 2019

Owner Matt Hyland doesn’t seem worried. “People gave us shit for Detroit pizza, but then they actually ate it they were like, ‘oh yeah, it’s just a pizza,’” he told Grub Street. “The whole New Yorker, ‘this is the real pizza’ bullshit will die down.’”

Violet is now open at 511 East 5th St., nr. Avenue A; you can check out the menu and make a reservations here.

(image courtesy of Dame Products)

These days, trains are delayed often enough for you to get a good look at whatever advertisements emblazon the subway walls. You might see ads for luxury scrubs or the city’s $15 minimum wage rollout, or perhaps ones for breast augmentation, birth control, or pitches for erectile dysfunction meds featuring limp cacti or simply the words “erectile dysfunction meds.” But you won’t be seeing ads for sex toys, as Dame Products has become the second sex toy company to have their ads considered and subsequently rejected by the MTA.

Dame Products, once deemed “the Glossier of Female Vibrators,” posted to Instagram on January 8 announcing the rejection, saying it was a “complete 180 from their initial agreement to work with us.” In a post on their website, they say they reached out about advertising with the MTA in July, were approved in September, and sent revised ads on November 2. Cue a response three weeks later saying they’d be “unable” to run the ads, citing a policy update made that same month that “prohibits any advertisement that promotes a sexually oriented business,” including “advertisements for sex toys or devices for any gender.” On December 3, they were rejected for good.

Correspondence with Outfront Media (screenshot courtesy of Dame Products)

“I did expect road bumps, because nothing ever goes smoothly,” said Dame Products CEO Alex Fine. “Because [the MTA] had just said to the New York Times they were willing to work with Unbound, and they weren’t going to discriminate against female sexual pleasure, I thought oh, we were gonna figure it out.”

Unbound is a sex toy company that had their own MTA ad troubles back in May; their brightly-colored illustrations of feminine figures lounging with pink dildos and bathrooms with vibrators were deemed too obscene, predominantly due to “explicit images of sex toys.” The MTA’s advertising policy as of October 2017 prohibits “obscene material,” the “public display of offensive sexual material,” and anything that could be construed as “dissemination of indecent material to minors.”

After this news appeared in multiple publications, the MTA issued a statement to the New York Times that they would “work with [Unbound] toward a resolution” that “allows their ads on the system.”

(screenshot courtesy of Dame Products)

Fine said her ads, which feature prominent sex toy imagery, didn’t draw the same criticism. “They didn’t have any issues with showing the product, which I thought was really interesting. Maybe if I just sold them as ‘massagers.’ I always want to be really upfront about what they are, but I definitely feel like the world prefers it to be coy.”

She said the feedback they received was more about the language used, preferring the matter-of-fact “toys, for sex” slogan rather than transit puns like “some riders need help getting off the train.” This “non-sexual” feedback made the rejection and new policy specifically against sex toys “even more surprising,” Fine said.

“It felt really random, it felt really targeted, it was really hurtful and rude, not just because they changed their policy but because they wasted so much of our time and money,” she added.

(image courtesy of Dame Products)

The MTA may not have been as willing to work with Unbound as they let on. In an email to Bedford + Bowery, Unbound’s co-founder and CEO Polly Rodriguez said Outfront Media, who handles advertising for the MTA, told them in order to receive “potential approval” they had to take all “phallic imagery” out of their ads.

She decided not to, saying it was “ridiculous” to have to pay their artists and go through the process again without an approval guarantee, and that it demonstrated a double standard.

Indeed, companies hawking ED meds like Roman and Hims (who also sells birth control through the company Hers, with subway ads of their own) told Broadly they had no problem getting their often phallic ads approved, noting they experienced a “great and open dialogue.”

a subway ad for Hims, a men’s wellness company that sells erectile dysfunction meds (image courtesy of Dame Products)

In an emailed statement, MTA spokesperson Shams Tarek said the agency “has a long-standing policy that prohibits advertising promoting a sexually oriented business. This decision was reached after careful review and is consistent with the advertising standards set by the MTA Board.” Outfront Media directed any questions on the matter to the MTA, saying it was “their change in policy,” not Outfront’s.

Public transit isn’t the only place sex toy companies are experiencing interest, then the cold shoulder. This week Gizmodo reported that the CES Innovation Awards, which honors consumer technology, rescinded an award nomination given to a Lora DiCarlo sex toy developed using robotics and AI, calling it “‘immoral’ and ineligible.”

Though Unbound was no longer interested in working with the MTA, Fine says Dame would “100%” still want to advertise if given another chance.

“I would feel like I had to run [the ads],” she said, noting that when they first came to Kickstarter wanting to crowdfund for their first toy they were denied due to the website not allowing sex toys, but successfully returned in 2016 with a campaign for Fin, a vibrator you can slip on two fingers like a ring. It was the first sex toy to ever grace the crowdfunding platform.

“Those are the things I’m most proud of accomplishing,” Fine said, “making people see [the sex toy industry] in a different light.”

(Photos: Ted Alcorn)

On a recent afternoon at 3 Dollar Bill in East Williamsburg, a group of performers brainstormed ways to involve the audience in their upcoming site-specific show. “Play Truth or Dare with them?” suggested one. “Make them react to specific musical and verbal cues?” echoed another. “Play trivia: drunk people love trivia!” interjected a third.

They had just finished rehearsing the anthem-like song “Amethyst & Diamond,” a high-octane group number in Oscar at the Crown.

The immersive musical is set in an overwhelmingly fascist future where all the “others” (non-whites, non-heteronormatives) have been exiled. “We imagine that all these others found this bunker and fashioned it into a nightclub fantasy, where they survive thanks to their love of performance, worshipping the show The OC and The Real Housewives,” creator Mark Mauriello told Bedford + Bowery after rehearsal. Oscar Wilde comes into play as the bunker dwellers are trying to stage a play about the Victorian dandy. “We have the belief that, through the performance of the show, we’re alive and surviving,” he continued. But their philosophy of we are free, we’re fabulous is challenged as soon as a newcomer ventures into the bunker the way Belle first enters the Beast’s castle.

Oscar at The Crown is the first full-length original production by The Neon Coven, a young and growing collective making theatrical performances focused on “otherness” with “high-octane music with a lot of screaming” and “theater in non-traditional spaces.” A previous production took place in an abandoned burger joint on Smith Street. Alongside Mauriello, the other founding members of The Neon Coven are composer/lyricist/choreographer Andrew Barret Cox and director Shira Milikowski. The three founders usually wear pentagram necklaces; besides symbolizing the five elements, it’s a symbol for witchcraft that resonates with them as creators, “a coven of like-minded people sharing goals of being free of being themselves.”

The production, which has been four or five years in the making in different iterations— a first version was actually Mauriello’s senior thesis at Harvard in 2015—is an enthusiastic tribute to pop icons of the early 2000s and pop culture and pop iconography as a whole. There’s a hymn-like song dedicated to the character of Julie Cooper in The OC. And Oscar Wilde is perceived as the one who got our attitude towards pop icons started.

“It was the late 1800s, and he was playing with all of that—using personas and craft,” said Mauriello. “He would have been great on Twitter, and his reality show would have been the best one.” In particular, Mauriello is fascinated with the dynamics of the rise and fall of pop stars such as Britney Spears, Lady Diana, and even Jesus. “It’s a grotesque fascination, with lifting someone up to tear them down,” he said.

For the majority of his creative career, Mauriello had been coveting a space such as the back room of 3 Dollar Bill, in his words “a room, reminiscent of [notorious Berlin nightclub] Berghain, metallic, concrete,” which delightfully contrasts with the costumes worn by the characters, a mix of pirate boots, early ‘00s sparkle and anime-forward cutouts.

The music is an endearing blend of influences such as jpop, kpop, and 70s and 90s disco. The songs we got to see performed during rehearsal have high ear-worm, dance and sing-along potential, courtesy of composer and lyricist Andrew Barret Cox. “I wanted to incorporate a bunch of different time periods in my songs: I am randomly inspired by 90s, 80s, 70s in my music,” Cox told Bedford + Bowery.  “A lot of that stuff was high-energy and positive music, and I think that’s why it resonates and resonated at that time.”

True to the title, Cox scattered Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms and quotes throughout the song lyrics. “Amethyst & Diamond,” for example, has “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying,” uttered the way Lady Gaga said “it does not matter if you are him or H.I.M” in “Born This Way.”

Oscar at the Crown joins the ranks of productions such as K-Pop and Cleopatra, immersive shows that forgo the psychosexual tension of, say, Sleep no More or Then She Fell in favor of a good time for the sake of a good time. This was also dictated by the location. “If you’re doing something in a nightclub, it has to belong in a nightclub,” said Mauriello. “People are drawn to this genre because they’re looking for communal experiences,” he said, reminiscing about Greek theater festivals, which had a strong communal and ritualistic component where people, in addition to actually watching the comedies and tragedies, actually drank and prayed. “It’s returning to that: let’s dance, let’s get up, let’s be part of something together.”

And should you not want to participate in the immersive experience, the creators are fine with you just dancing to their tunes.

Oscar at The Crown opens on January 18 at Three Dollar Bill. Tickets available here.